Le Roi du bois
One of the first 60 copies on vergé Ingres paper, signed by the author (no. 12).
The work had first appeared in a limited, confidential edition of 48 copies in 1992, with three engravings by Richard Texier. Five years had passed since Rimbaud le fils, and Pierre Michon now drew from his working notebooks this Roi du bois, which had lain dormant there since 1975. It was well worth the wait.
Michon once again captures a fragment of humanity drawn from a potentially ordinary life: that of a modest peasant, a swineherd and gatherer of acorns, who becomes an apprentice painter to Claude Lorrain in order to taste the “real life” of the rich and powerful, and who is bound to that domain — a realm of shadow and light — by the emblematic apparition of a woman in the forest. In a few pages, Michon manages to create a genuine mythology, sweeping, animal and breathless.
The text was published jointly with La Grande Beune, which is simply another way of describing this sensual and erotic vision.