Jean COCTEAU. Autograph manuscript, Un coup d'épée dans l'eau, Valberg August 14, 1958; 1 large folio page, torn from a drawing book, with erasures and corrections. Beautiful text re-establishing the truth about his conversion to the Church "If one day my great specialty is discovered, the one where I was alone in the world and incomparable, it will be the denial of genres. [The letter to Jacques Maritain was a bomb capable of reducing to powder the bric-a-brac of Saint-Sulpice; it was a question of giving back to the Church the goods it had lost. I had underestimated the prudence of the great prelates and their great mastery. Far from putting me at the door of the temple", they made of his bomb "the example of a return of the prodigal son, a conversion worthy of spreading graces", and prevented it from bursting... ". As for Jacques Maritain, that soul disguised as a body for the sake of politeness, he drowned my explosives with an answer in which he avoided following me. I loved him too much to respond to his answer and to adopt the method dear to Gide, a method that accumulates paperwork, whereas mine consists in burning as much of it as possible, except when I am robbed and find it in the catalog of the auction house. This is the story of a manifesto that stands alone in my work and seems to be (wrongly) the result of a whim of the mind or, rather, of a weakness of heart. He nevertheless preserves for Maritain "a tender and respectful friendship and does not disavow any line of my letter, because, as I said to Mauriac, "If I happen to be a mediocre Catholic, I wish, in spite of Nietzsche, to always remain a perfect Christian" He adds in P.S. that "the two letters published by Grasset were to be used as a preface to a collection of young escapees from L'Action française that Maritain had made known to me. But neither Maurras nor Maritain [...] having communicated the slightest flame to them, we were unable to follow up our project.