On est si sérieux quand on a 19 ans, édition originale

"The bourgeois are so smug in their ignorance, so sure of their false superiority, that you want to shovel them down the drain like rats," wrote Julien Green as a young student. You're so serious when you're nineteen years old...

From the debauchery of feelings and ideas that emerge from the first pages of this volume, emerge the themes that will inhabit man and the writer. The taste for solitude, the conviction that one must learn to love better, the contempt for those who have reached their goal, the torments of the flesh, the curiosity for the other: the way is clear, all spiritual. The angry young Catholic boy will soon launch his Pamphlet against the Catholics of France. A little later, the writer in search of absolute sincerity, passionate about reading Joyce, will write his first novel, Mont-Cinère, straight out of the darkness of those years, out of the mixture of love of life and the fear of living that this first volume of the Journal, unpublished to date, bears witness to.

ORIGINAL EDITION on publishing paper.