Chapter 146April 13, 1959

(Letter to Mother from Satprem)

Pondicherry, April 13, 1959 Sweet Mother Here is the outline for the book on Sri Aurobindo for the Éditions du Seuil.139 It is a rough sketch, and in the actual process of writing, the proposed sequence may change according to the inner necessity, but these are the themes to be developed. So now T would like to know what you feel and if you see anything to be changed, added or deleted.

Your child, with love.

Signed: Satprem

(On Anatole France and La Révolte des Anges)

... These children don’t understand [Sri Aurobindo’s irony]. They read it prosaically (gesture indicating the surface). Strangely enough, it’s the same phenomenon when they read Anatole France. And Anatole France, read without understanding his irony, is abominably commonplace.

They don’t grasp the irony. Sri Aurobindo had it. He understood the irony of Anatole France so well, he had this same thing – so subtle, so refined ...

‘Very good,’ he would say while reading La Révolte des Anges ‘Yes, it is true, which of the two 139A French publishing house that had asked for a book on Sri Aurobindo to be included in their collection, ‘Spiritual