Jacques LAURENT (1919-2000). Signed autograph manuscript, La Folle de Gauguin, [1956] ; 9 pages in-8 with blue and red pens (printer's marks). Article published in Arts of May 16, 1956. Laurent relates a curious news item that should have prompted a writer to develop it in Arts. "Woe! It would have been to weigh on a news item, thus neglecting the crisis of the theatre, the destiny of Western thought, the influence of Plotinus on Freud whose birthday it is precisely, the onthological concern in ceramics and the eternal return of generals, varnishes, chestnut trees, ... He ironizes on this disdainful preference for abstraction rather than "authentically humanistic humanism," citing the complaints of readers after the publication of Giono's notes on the Lurs trial [the Dominici case]: "Everything happens as if cultured people considered culture as a resolutely dead language..." Similarly, the bourgeois press is sometimes thin to the point of triviality, sometimes swollen with rhetoric. "Everything is as if it were a matter of making us go crazy with empty celebrations full of verbs, and of schematizing to the bone everything that bears the mark of our Adventure"... And to quote an anecdote from Gauguin's Racontars de Rapin: the meeting of a blind, naked and mad woman obsessed the painter for two months, "and all my work in front of my easel was permeated with it in spite of myself". [...] We would like the painter and the novelist to receive these disturbing visits and not despise them"...