Poupée blonde

First edition of this play — at the time the only one written by Patrick Modiano, later joined by Nos débuts dans la vie in 2017.

On 15 May 1974, at the Théâtre du Gymnase, Modiano’s first play, Polka, premiered. It “met with no success, not even a succès d’estime […]. This attempt to dramatize an essentially interior vision failed and, by the author’s own admission, the play was ‘a genuine disaster'” (Nettelbeck, Patrick Modiano pièces d’identité, 1986). It was never published and remains unpublished to this day.

Nine years after this failure, with the delicate illustrations of Pierre Le-Tan, with whom Modiano had already collaborated on Memory Lane, “the writer in a sense recycled his play. Since he had been criticized for practicing the ‘most worn-out kind of theater,’ he here plays on that very weakness, devising a deliberately dated piece. A parody of ‘worn-out theater,’ a self-pastiche whose value comes from everything surrounding it: the fake advertisements for luxury brands and cabarets, the photographs of the author and the actors drawn by Le-Tan, the note describing the settings… The whole is to be savored with a knowing wink. In many respects, Poupée blonde is a reworking of La Polka.” (Denis Cosnard, Dans la peau de Patrick Modiano, Fayard, 2011).

The play tells the story of a band — the Peter Pan — made up of four friends who, twenty years earlier, had known fame with a hit song, Poupée blonde. Two of the members, Louise and Félix, are dead, and watch, like ghosts, over the survivors caught in the memory of their success.

In the manner of postwar theater programs, which presented the cast, the venue and the staging with a great deal of advertising, Le-Tan’s line drawings pastiche these contents, also providing staging sketches and depictions of the actors. Modiano and Le-Tan themselves are drawn and appear at the front of the volume.

Rare with an inscription.

A fine copy with an excellent editorial provenance: Sylvie Genevoix, a journalist at Le Figaro and L’Express, was literary director at Éditions Albin Michel, which she had joined in 1992. She was also the daughter of Maurice Genevoix, the novelist and academician who wrote Raboliot and Ceux de 14, and who awarded Modiano the Académie française’s Prix du roman for Les Boulevards de ceinture in 1972.