With the pleasure of God is a novel written of 1938 to 1974 and published in the editions Gallimard in 1974, in which Jean d' Ormesson describes through the life of its family, the evolution of the Mentalité S and values throughout the XXe century within a family of very old Aristocratie. He seeks to identify with benevolence and sincerity but without kindness, continuities, inflectings, ruptures and similarities sometimes paradoxical, and to testify to an environment and a daily life rather than to tell personal histories of hero.

It is also the currency of the family of the author, old woman of more than thousand years.

The literary project through some extracts of the novel

• "It is banal that it is necessary to show, because it is him that one does not see any more, through practice and of familiarité." (p155).
• " The strangenesses and the madnesses which our novels depict us unroll on a bottom about which nobody never speaks because it is known of everyone. One deploys the crime in front of our eyes, the inceste, the adventures rarest and most astonishing, those whose account tears off with the good public the decisive cry: " But it is a true novel! " What one conceals, which one leaves with the history, who is completely unable besides to reconstitute it afterwards, it is the tacit treasure of the general climate, of the temperature of the life, the collective rules accepted by the group: this unmemorable bottom in the way of being and of thinking, these anchors of the spirit of the time which orders, but secretly, surface waves of our daily existence. Obvious trainer, trainer of daily newspaper, showman of banal, here are titles that I ambitionne. I tell my family. And not its crimes, because there was hardly. And not its madnesses, because they were reasonable. But what she thought of the world and her life of each day. And I do not even bring back his clothing, his manias, the anecdotes which were transmitted to it, this way which the nape of the neck of its inch had my grandfather to scrape. "

Some other extracts

• (p111) " There was however at Karl Marx and in the Marxists who could, I do not certainly say to allure, but finally, perhaps, despite everything, vaguely to retain my grandfather, if it had not decided, once for all, to be unaware of the socialist revolution radically. This something was a mixture of antipathy for the money and industrial capitalism, of opposition to the middle-class, of iron contempt for freedom, of tender of the individual to a community which exceeds it, of direction of the need and veneration for the histoire".
• (p144) " Each one knows that the romanticism was an adventure before finishing in a marsh mallow which makes yawn the collégiens."
• (p167) " From generation to generation, we had been wary of the questions. And from time immemorial, of any heart, with the questions without answers, we had preferred the answers without question".
• (p179) " We discovered with amazement that the others looked at us, and not only to admire us, and that they judged us like us them jugions".

Some broad topics

• the family, place of membership, continuity.
• the way in which we are worked by our medium and the historical circumstances. (p117) " None us is anything else that what the world around him decided that it est".
• the time which passes and the way in which he is lived. (p118) " We left the time which passes and we settled in the time which dure"
• the refusal then the rallying with the new values:
• antirépublicains then defending the Fatherland,
• the report/ratio with the ideas and the truth: " it was to avoid doubting that we had given up thinking (p85) ".
• variety of the individual courses, with (beautiful) brothers or cousins engaging on the unfavourable sides of the war of Spain, in resistance or collaboration
• the church and what it represents
• the attachment with the ground, with a place
• the opposition, then the rallying, with the Bourgeoisie. (p270) " During centuries, we had been distinguished from the middle-class and had opposed to it. We felt closer to the soldiers, the craftsmen, the peasants especially that of the middle-class men of the big cities. The taste almost maniac of nature, the fear of any change, the tender with the Church, mistrust for the machines, the hostility with the money, the goods, the ideas had separated us from eux."

Some go with the history

• Parisian artistic medium of before guard joined together by the aunt Gabrielle Street of Game preserve in Paris
• two world wars
• the war of Spain
• De Gaulle and Pétain

Reference and bibliography

Folio number 1243, from which the numbers from page for the quotations of this article are drawn.

Random links:

Hydre (heraldic) | Mikhail Bestoujev-Rioumine | Gilbert Thiel | Uneven crossing | Oreitia