La Dernière Nuit

There is no certain evidence for either the composition or publication date of this sequence of seven poems. It is often assumed — on the strength of the misleading colophon date of April 3, 1942, given in Poésie et Vérité 1942, where the poems are reprinted, and of Éluard’s documented presence at Vézelay with the Zervos family in the first quarter of 1942 — to have been published by Éditions Cahiers d’Art at that time, or even as early as January. It is, however, unlikely that La Dernière Nuit was composed before June 1942, or in any case published before the summer. Jean-Charles Gateau states, without citing sources (Paul Éluard ou le frère voyant, p. 277), that Éluard published the book in late June in response to the executions on 23 and 30 May of Georges Politzer, Jacques Solomon and Jacques Decour, the three founders in February 1941 of the clandestine La Pensée libre (Decour also being, with Jean Paulhan, a founder of Les Lettres françaises). In the two letters he sent to Louis Parrot on 20 and 28 August, asking him to find a Swiss publisher for a series of poems “under the title Poésie et Vérité 1942” whose order he lays out, Éluard indeed refers to the “seven poems of la dernière nuit which are to appear in Poésie 42” (which did not in fact happen), noting that “Seghers has a good copy” (Scheler, pp. 148–152) — with no mention of the Cahiers d’Art publication, presumably because he knew his correspondent did not have access to it. By that date, in any case, the book had already appeared, as shown by the presentation inscriptions of 9 July to Max Jacob on the proofs and of 1 August to Francis Poulenc on his copy (Ader sale, June 20, 2017, lot 194).

There even exists a bon à tirer dated April 4, 1942, signed by Éluard on the corrected title page of the book, after which were bound the manuscript poems of “Écris plus vite,” the corrected proofs of their publication in Messages, and those of La Dernière Nuit, the only ones published as such in the end (“Surréalisme et poésie contemporaine” [coll. Yves Breton], Hôtel Drouot, 1954, no. 140).

The poems, defiant in tone, are clearly directed against the Occupier: “Des hommes vont venir qui n’ont plus peur d’eux-mêmes / Car ils sont sûrs de tous les hommes / Car l’ennemi à figure d’homme disparaît.”

Éluard’s founding act of refusal, opening the way to clandestine literary resistance, in its fitting copy no. 42.