Henri Bordeaux, who is
his biographer, enable us to form a clearer and fuller conception of
Camille Violand than of any of his compeers. Born in 1891, he was
typical of that latest generation of which we have spoken, in whom all
seemed to be unconsciously preparing for the great and critical
sacrifice. He was born at Lyons, but was brought up in the Quercy,
that wild and tortured district just north of the Pyrenees, where
nature seems to gather together all that she possesses of the
grotesque and violent in landscape; but he was educated at Alencon,
and trained at Vouziers, in the midst of the orchards of Normandy.
Thus both sides of France, the Midi and the Manche, were equally known
to him, but the ceaseless peregrinations which he underwent, so far
from enlarging his horizon, seem to have plunged his soul in
melancholy. At the age of twenty he struck M. Bordeaux as being the
typical _deracine._
The letters of Camille Violand and the memories of his friends present
to us the record of a vague and uneasy boyhood. He began quite early
to exercise his mind in prose and verse, but without energy or aim.
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