La Folle de Chaillot
One of the copies on vélin (no. 1207).
Copy belonging to the American filmmaker George Cukor, with his bookplate.
The play premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de l’Athénée on 19 December 1945, staged by Louis Jouvet in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation: a poetic satire in which a lucid “madwoman” and her allies from the street outwit the greed of “Presidents” and speculators ready to dynamite Paris for an imaginary oil deposit — a moral fable that became a symbol of a Paris to be saved from industrial greed. The Ides et Calendes edition appeared a few weeks before the wider distribution given by Grasset the following year, and fixes the text of Jouvet’s revival.
George Cukor never adapted La Folle de Chaillot, but the chain of connections is nonetheless strong: Cukor was instrumental in the career of Katharine Hepburn, star of the English-language film The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), and his library attests to a lasting interest in theatrical repertoire. In the New York of the 1900s where he grew up, theater was largely shaped by European models, “notably French theater, which remained the major foreign influence there until the end of the decade […].”