Rigadoon

Books by Céline

available in translation

RIGADOON

NORTH

CASTLE TO CASTLE

GUIGNOL'S BAND

DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT

First published in French by Éditions Gallimard

under the title RIGODON.

Copyright © 1969 by Éditions Gallimard

English translation copyright © 1974 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book

may be reproduced in any form or by any means

without the prior written permission of the Publisher,

excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews

written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing

Designed by Karen Gurwitz

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Destouches, Louis Ferdinand, 1894-1961.

      Rigadoon.

      The third of a trilogy, the title of the first

being North, and that of the second Castle to castle.

       I. Title.

PZ3.D475Ri [PQ2607.E834]         843'.9'12        73-19906

ISBN 0-440-07364-2

To the animals

        I thank him.

                                                          —L
UCETTE
D
ESTOUCHES

PREFACE

North, Castle to Castle, and Rigadoon
form a trilogy, the last volume of which is now, more than seven years after Celine's death, being made available to the public.
Rigadoon
was written in Meudon during 1960 and 1961 on yellow paper in a fine hand that is difficult and sometimes almost impossible to read.

Sensing the approach of death, Céline had worked unflaggingly on this last book. On the morning of July 1, 1961, he told his wife, Lucette, that
Rigadoon
was finished; then he wrote to Gaston Gallimard, informing him of the news. At six o'clock that evening he was dead.

Two successive versions of
Rigadoon
show how hard Céline worked on this book. Changes have been made on every page, almost in every line; one word is replaced by another and still another, then as often as not the third is replaced by the first; frequently the whole sentence is revised, reformulated. As this constant revision shows, Céline was so concerned with style that he could not let a sentence rest until he had assured himself that it would impress the reader as not written but spoken . . . and spoken spontaneously, without reflection.

His wife had asked the attorney André Damien to decipher
Rigadoon
. Aware of the importance of every detail, he devoted all his holidays and free time to the staggering task. Hadn't Céline written in this same book:

". . . just an accent here, a comma there . . . you've got to watch out for copyreaders, you see, they operate with 'plain common sense' . . . plain common sense' is the death of rhythm! . . ."

In
North, Castle to Castle,
and
Rigadoon
we encounter the same circumstances of time, place, and action, and also the same characters: Céline, his wife Lucette, the actor Le Vigan, and Bébert.

It was in 1932, at the pet shop of the Samaritaine department store, that Le Vigan bought the cat whom he named Bébert and who was to become the most famous cat in contemporary French literature.

Adopted by Lucette and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, he accompanied them on their travels through a Europe in flames; he shared their life in hospitals, in prison, and in exile, and died in Meudon in 1952 at the age of twenty.

These are the principal actors in the book; the others are extras: Stationmasters of demolished stations, generals without an army, countless corpses, nurses, lost children, various animals, a lamentable procession of the living and the dead, all, with Céline, witnesses to the Apocalypse.

Rigadoon
is not a novel but a chronicle. Indeed, Céline describes himself as:

"I, chronicler of Grands Guignols."

Was he a chance spectator? Was he a victim of chance or an enlightened enthusiast, always in the front row at catastrophes, so as to get a good view of them, experience them, and tell about them?

In 1914, when he was only seventeen, he wrote prophetically in a text that was found shortly before his death and published under the title
The Notebooks of Cuirassier Destouches:

"But what I want most of all is to live a life full of incidents that I hope providence will put in my path . . ."

and further on:

". . . if I pass through the great crises that life holds in store for me, I shall perhaps be less unhappy than other men, for I wish to experience and to know . . ."

Later, on December 30, 1932, in a letter to Léon Daudet, he wrote:

"I take pleasure only in the grotesque on the confines of death."

And in
Féerie pour une Autre Fois:

"Nothing intoxicates me so much as great disasters, I easily get drunk on calamities, I don't positively look for them, but they come to me like guests that have rights of a kind."

At about 1 o'clock on the night of May 23, 1968, fire broke out in what had been Celine's office in Meudon and then spread to the other rooms in the house, consuming furniture, mementoes, and manuscripts. By midnight the main house was reduced to a blind skeleton.

One can imagine the story that Louis-Ferdinand Destouches would have made of this "Célinian" catastrophe; what a fresco he would have painted! What an end for
Rigadoon!
He who no longer had the strength to attach himself to objects and had no other ambition than a mass grave!

But a few steps away from the ruins, the aviary was still intact and Toto the parrot very much alive. Today he is master of these ruins. Witness and guardian of ghosts, he is waiting for the Chinese in this Grand Guignol setting.

—F
RANÇOIS
G
IBAULT

"Certainly not, Poulet! There's more to come!"

"Ah?! . . . I'm all ears!"

"All the little Jesus' religions, Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish, all in the same boat! All one! they can nail him to the cross or bake him up in wafers, same difference! same imposture! fairy tales! hokum!"

"Is that all?"

"Far from it! Try and follow me, my dear imbecile."

"Fire away!"

"There's only one religion: Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish . . . all branches of the same 'little Jesus' chains! they hassle, they rip each other's guts out? . . . blarney! . . . for the crowd! their big job, their only real job . . . perfect agreement . . . is to besot and destroy the white race."