Le Mot de Cambronne
One of 25 deluxe copies on Japanese paper, this copy no. 10.
A significant one-act comedy by Guitry, first performed at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in the autumn of 1936, with Guitry as Cambronne and Marguerite Moreno as his English wife, running for 110 performances until 3 January 1937.
Far from a simple historical pun, Guitry followed a suggestion made by Edmond Rostand in 1912 (“Cambronne married an Englishwoman: isn’t there a comedy subject there?”), condensing his art of brevity into verse: half an hour of perfectly sustained “irreverence,” soon adapted for the screen with the stage cast (including Delubac and Pauline Carton), for a film shown at the Cinéma Normandie on 26 March 1937 — a lightning-fast shoot recalled by cinematographer Philippe Agostini, a genuine “théâtre ce soir”-style recording avant la lettre.
The copy is enriched with a period photograph showing Guitry and Marguerite Moreno on stage, an original print signed in ink by the Waléry studio.
Lorcey, 229–230.