Le Roi du bois
One of the first 60 copies on vergé Ingres paper, this one hors commerce, numbered and signed by the author.
First published in a confidential edition limited to 48 copies in 1992, with three etchings by Richard Texier. Five years had passed since Rimbaud le fils, and Pierre Michon returned to his working notebooks, where this Roi du bois had lain dormant since 1975 — a transitional narrative, much like Empereur d’Occident had been in 1989.
Michon here again captures a fragment of humanity drawn from what might have been an ordinary life: that of a humble peasant, a swineherd and acorn-gatherer, who becomes an apprentice painter to Claude Lorrain in order to taste “real life,” that of the rich and powerful. Twenty years later, in order to be sensitive to the beauty of the world and to tell of it, he looks back with a prince’s retrospective gaze, having returned to the muddy world to become, modestly, “the king of the wood.”
This copy was exhibited in 2021 at the exhibition Louise Bescond, Reliures 2017-2020 at the Librairie Métamorphoses (catalogue no. 27).