ABSTRACT
For several dozen people in Paris-novelists, poets, theater or film direc tors, actors, critics, painters, independent producers, most of whom used to meet in the vicinity of the Odeon, the Rue du Bac, and the Seine (long before the existentialist invasion, when the Deux Magots was still a liter ary center and people went to the Cafe de Flore to meet Jean Renoir, Paul Grimault,1 or Jacques Prevert)—for a few dozen people in the Paris of Arts, Letters, and Friendship, then, there had been a Roger Leenhardt case ever since the war and even before it. This thin little man, slightly bent forward as if he were carrying the weight of God-knows-what ideal weariness on his shoulders, this little man occupied a discrete, unusual, and exquisite place at the border between French literature and film.
