Happy Birthday, Blaise

Blaise Cendrars (born 1 September 1887)

Happy birthday to the weird and wonderful Blaise Cendrars (real name, Frédéric Louis Sauser) whose alter ego kept creating alter egos (Our review of Moravagine is here.)

In La Pierre, 1 September 1917, during the war in which he lost his right arm, although that didn’t slow him down, he wrote:

“And more than ever I marvel to see how simple everything is, how easy, useless, and absolutely unnecessary. We commit the most gigantic acts of stupidity and the world hee-haws with joy as, for example, with war, its fanfares, its Te Deums, its victory celebrations, its bells, its flags, its monuments, its wooden crosses. “One night in Paris will replace them all,” said Napoleon after inspecting the battlefield at Leipzig. How admirable life is. One night in Paris…”