\b0 Louis-Ferdinand Destouches was born in Courbevoie in 1894. A courageous soldier during the First Wo
rld War, he became a doctor and worked for the League of Nations and then in the suburbs of Paris, all of which led him to turn a deeply pessimistic gaze on his contemporaries. In 1932, under the pseudonym of CΘline (his grandmother's first name), he pub
lished \i Voyage au bout de la nuit \i0 (\i Journey to the End of the Night\i0 ), an extraordinary and essentially autobiographical work. Its tumultuous and staccato style, admirably composed in a prose that used all the registers of the language, was to
tally new, and was used again in his second novel \i Mort α crΘdit\i0 (\i Death on the Instalment Plan\i0 , 1938). But his pacifism and anti-Semitism led him into collaboration with the German occupiers around 1940. Taking refuge in Denmark, he was impr
isoned and did not return to France until 1951. He died there ten years later after having added several more titles to one of the most important bodies of literary work of the twentieth century.\par
