Bernard Tristan – Memoirs of a young man tidy: In the 1900s, Daniel Henry, a young man of 20 years son of a small clothier-tailor, decides after mature reflections to fall in love with Berthe Voraud, daughter of a another bourgeois industrialist. Fortunately, she gives in to her timid advances and the affair goes to marriage, perhaps thanks to the two more enterprising fathers who are very interested in the other party’s money.

Daniel is old before age: A young man tidy, it’s just a euphemism, it’s a young man cramped in his clothes and his ideas, conformist to excess, who always seeks to know what others think from him ; he does only what is done or what he believes he must do. Published in 1899, it is the first novel by Tristan Bernard, accustomed rather to writing plays, pamphlets, words of wit. Here he presents a humorous and subversive critique of the life of the bourgeois of his time.

Close to Leon Blum, Jules Renard, Lucien Guitry, Paul Gordeaux, Marcel Pagnol, and many others, famous for his play on words, his crosswords and his theater boulevard, writer-chronicler-sportsman-gastronome, Tristan Bernard was also a successful novelist writer. He contributed to the detective genre with his collection Amants et Voleurs (1905) and several other novels. Arrested as a Jew in 1943 and interned in Drancy, he narrowly escaped deportation. Published in La Presse in 1900, this sentence of Francis de Croisset sums up our author very well: “He has meticulous and analytical observation. He scrutinizes the human heart with pinpricks. He searches it with his short nails, with the acute and tickling pleasure that one feels at scratching a pimple. “