Partage de midi

This edition follows the one published more than forty years earlier, in 1906, printed in 150 copies by the Éditions de la Bibliothèque de l’Occident and distributed to Claudel’s circle. As ambassador at the time, he did not wish to have the play staged or more widely circulated. The text, unrevised, is enriched with a previously unpublished preface dated January 1948, essential to understanding the stakes of this late publication.
Rosalie Vetch, Claudel’s great youthful love, had inspired the character of Ysé (and, some years later, that of Prouhèze in Le Soulier de satin). She is buried at Vézelay, where her tomb bears this line by the poet: “Only the rose is fragile enough to express eternity” (from Cent phrases pour éventails).
The play was staged forty-two years later, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault; the premiere took place on 16 December 1948 at the Théâtre Marigny. Edwige Feuillère played Ysé, Jean-Louis Barrault played Mesa, Pierre Brasseur played Amalric, and Jacques Dacqmine played de Ciz.
Barrault’s production, like the play itself, was a great success, with costumes by Bérard. It was revived in 1954 (again at Marigny), then in 1957 (at the Théâtre des Nations), and in 1961 and 1966 (at the Théâtre de l’Odéon), always with Barrault and Feuillère.

A fine copy, enriched with a letter from Paul Claudel to Jean-Louis Barrault, on his letterhead from 11 boulevard Lannes. The author asks his director to sign the verso, after his own signature, and then to ask the three other actors to do the same, in order to “procure an innocent satisfaction for the signatory of this letter (…) and then to send it all back to me,” for the attention of the photographer Maurice Selb, to whom this copy would be given. The envelope accompanying the letter, indeed signed by Edwige Feuillère, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur and Jacques Dacqmine, is addressed by Claudel and is preserved at the front. Following it, a photograph dated the day of the premiere, 16 December, is mounted on a guard: it depicts the four performers of the play.

Accompanied by: Partage de midi. Paris, Gallimard, (May 12) 1949. 1 vol. (120 x 190 mm). In wrappers.
New stage version, revised and corrected by Claudel after the performances given at the Théâtre Marigny. One of 35 copies on vélin pur fil (no. XV).
As soon as the Marigny performances began, Claudel started work on a new version of his play, as he explains to Barrault in the same letter:
“I have just finished copying my new version of Partage. 99 large-format pages! It is all being typed. I will send you a copy when it comes back to me.”
He also confides that he comes to see “his” play surreptitiously: “I go from time to time to the Théâtre Marigny and, through the narrow crack of a box door, I try to see what is happening on stage…”