Maudits soupirs pour une autre fois

The manuscript was conceived while Céline was imprisoned in Denmark, beginning around August 1946, and developed substantially during 1947.

It opens around memories of the apartment on rue Girardon. Among the early episodes is a visit from Clémence Arlon, who arrives with books to be signed. That mundane event opens into an expanding mental geography of Montmartre.

Friends appear. The narrator remembers childhood. He remembers war. The past begins overlapping the present.

Then the physical world intrudes violently: the bombing begins. What starts as remembrance becomes an escape narrative as Céline and those around him seek protection and prepare to leave.

Because the text is a developmental manuscript, it does not possess the finalised architecture of Féerie I or Normance. Its progression is roughly the following.

Montmartre. The narrator is in the imaginative space of rue Girardon before the 1944 flight from Paris. Clémence Arlon visits to have books signed.

Memory expands. The narrator mentally moves through Montmartre. Friends and acquaintances pass through his recollections. Episodes from childhood and the First World War interrupt the present. The book's real action increasingly becomes memory itself.

Threat and accusation. The narrator is conscious that the world around him is collapsing politically and personally. The later Célinian themes of persecution, betrayal and literary self-defence are already developing.

Bombardment. The bombing of Montmartre begins. External catastrophe reorganises the wandering narrative. The narrator prepares for departure.

Cemetery refuge. He and others seek shelter around the cemetery. The manuscript continues through material that Céline would subsequently divide, rewrite, expand or discard while creating the two published Féerie volumes. It also contains the beginnings of a projected continuation that he never completed.