“What will I see in a few hours? Will it really be the war? Will I see men killing each other? I sometimes get to imagine all of this is a dream and war does not exist but as a nightmare”. These are the words written by Ramón del Valle-Inclán in a manuscript notebook he carried along during his trip to French war front on May, 6^th 1916. They had remained unknown, until his documentary legacy was transferred to the University of Santiago de Compostela, for the GIVIUS (Grupo de Investigación Valle-Inclán) to classify and study it, in 2009. A very small diary with black polished covers and purple fly leaves was among the five thousand pages recovered. A sort of logbook with a three dimensional value: it is the best of the documents to reconstruct the writer´s experience during that trip; it is also one of the best proofs of his writing mechanisms in the transcription of vivid events; finally, it was the lacking piece in the process to understand his two later books about I World War (En la luz del día and La Medianoche).

Prof. Margarita Santos Zas offers in El Cuaderno de Francia (1916): Manuscrito inédito de Ramón del Valle-Inclán, in a delicate and beautiful edition a preliminary study recovering the war itineraries of the writer, plus a diplomatic, critical and annotated edition of the Notebook. In addition, a facsimile of the Cuaderno de Francia itself allows the curious reader to come closer to the Galician writer´s experience. Please, visit USC Editora for more info.