“Finally…”¹

(Translated by Elizabeth Hardwick and John McCormick)

“. . . . . Finally a great work of art will always find its true place in History and in the collective consciousness. In the end, art reveals itself for what it is; it will place itself exactly where it belongs in the scheme of things. . . . Finally, there is no such thing as ‘génie méconnu’: art, scorned in the beginning, always ends up by reaching its public and founding, in its turn, a new Academy. Genius, by definition, cannot remain buried forever: isn’t a genius precisely he who ‘fait des enfants’? Stendhal precedes Taine and the naturalists, Van Gogh comes before the Fauves, Lautréamont and even Ubu before the Surrealists, Rimbaud ‘fathers’ ourselves. The great impersonal justice of history guarantees reparation for its former neglect. Let the artists be reassured: each will have his turn, will be promoted in the order of seniority, will finish, like all the rest, in the Academy, the museum, the warehouse, in the lumber-room (as Queneau says), in short, in Eternity.”