Jeannot, Memoirs of a Child, Jean Dutourd

"This book stops when I'm thirteen. Thirteen is the age when childhood ends, when one becomes an adolescent, that is to say a man, and when one mysteriously loses all the intelligence one enjoyed until then."

Jean Dutourd

"Most people have forgotten what kind of soul one possesses at six, at eight, at twelve years old. It is taken for granted that a child is only the sketch of a man. But this is not true: a child is a complete being in itself and very different from an adult. It has its own ideas, its morality, its desires, its loves, its philosophy and finally, the weapons appropriate to its state. As it is the weakest, the most used of these weapons can only be lying. Children lie constantly, for peace of mind, to take the shortest route in life. In novels or memoirs, children are, so to speak, anthropomorphic. I have tried, on the contrary, here, to depict a totally childlike child, in the manner in which Jack London depicted sled dogs, by putting myself in its skin, which is not my own. Or rather which is no longer my own, because Jeannot, the hero of this book, is me, from six to thirteen years old. I have forgotten nothing of that time, and what I thought I had forgotten has resurfaced, intact, in my memory, that is to say not only the events of my childhood, but also the ideas, the feelings, the passions, the experience I had then. Some episodes were tragedies, like the death of my mother when I was seven; others comedies, like my father's military period, my posh relations with the King of Romania in exile in Paris, my expulsion from catechism, the description of the Colonial Exhibition, a great festival of the Third Republic. This book stops when I'm thirteen. Thirteen is the age when childhood ends, when one becomes an adolescent, that is to say a man, and when one mysteriously loses all the intelligence one enjoyed until then. I had, very clearly, then, a feeling of intellectual and sentimental regression. In short, I became stupid. Perhaps it is only today that I have finally become Jeannot again? It took time!"

Jean Dutourd