Paul Eluard.

Lot 154
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10000 - 12000 EUR
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Result : 16 429EUR
Paul Eluard.
Capitale de la douleur. Paris, Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue française, 1926. Small in-4: paperback; red half-maroquin case and folder. First edition. One of the first 109 copies reprinted in quarto tellière format on Lafuma-Navarre laid paper, this one of the 9 hors commerce (copy F). The printed mark showing a kind of paper casserole is crossed out by the poet, who added: "This is not from me, no. Paul." A key collection, a witness to Paul Eluard's early Surrealist period, Capitale de la douleur was celebrated by André Breton, who noted its "vast, singular, abrupt, profound, splendid, heart-rending movements." (Bibliothèque nationale, En français dans le texte, 1990, nº 357.) Exceptional autograph letter on the false title: At this moment, Gala, my dreams are growing old Will I leave you for the night and so that your hand, when I wake up, opens before me like a dawn, hiding everything from me? to play. Will I leave you to find you again? I cannot lose myself. I have to honour you, humbly, with a thousand words, a thousand gestures, with which I adorn myself and over which you pass Paul Eluard The moving letter "was written around 1930, at the beginning of a crisis that was to lead to the definitive break between Eluard and Gala" (OEuvres complètes II, Pléiade, p. 960). The Pléiade editor reproduces another, more laconic letter to the same author on Capitale de la douleur, dated July 1931. Several autograph pieces are attached, mostly poems from Capitale de la douleur: A la flamme des fouets I et II. Autograph manuscripts, the first signed, 2 pp. in-8 on graph paper with erasures and corrections. The poems appeared in La Revue européenne in 1925. Sans rancune. Autograph manuscript, 1 p. in-4 with corrections. The poem first appeared in 1923 in the journal Littérature, and later in the collection Mourir de ne pas mourir (1924). The curve of your eyes... Autograph manuscript, 1 p. in-12 on the back of a letter on NRF letterhead addressed on 7 May 1925 by Jean Paulhan to Paul Eluard. First draft manuscript, primitive version of the poem. In his letter, Jean Paulhan announces the forthcoming dispatch of the proofs of the three poems of Capitale de la douleur which appeared in the NRF on 1 October 1925: "Have I told you how much I love them? Well, I'm telling you. This is one of your most beautiful things." The curve of your eyes... Autograph manuscript, 1 p. in-8 on graph paper, in ink and pencil, with erasures and corrections. Second, different, but not final version. List of poem titles for Capital of Pain [circa 1925]. Autograph manuscript in purple ink on 2 pp. in-16 from a spiral notebook.
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