One of 30 copies on Imperial Japan paper, with the double suite in color and black, and the original watercolor, numbered and signed by the publisher (no. 21).
La Passion… is a poem in the Angevin dialect, composed in 1916 “on the outskirts of Verdun,” in which the author — then a mobilized officer — transposes the sacrifice of the soldier into a popular passion play: a poilu “brother,” a peasant from Anjou, presents himself at the gates of Paradise and must answer before the assembly of saints.
Creator of the Rimiaux — poems and rhymed tales in the Angevin dialect —, Marc Leclerc had established himself from the beginning of the century as one of the leading voices of Anjou literature, alongside Émile Joulain and Yvon Péan. Born into a family of military men from Saumur, he first turned to the visual arts, training at the École normale d’enseignement du dessin under Eugène Grasset, before moving into journalism in 1904 (L’Angevin de Paris). The publication of the Rimiaux in 1913 established him as a poet of the soil, whose verve, rooted in the Angevin idiom, won him a devoted readership. The publication, in December 1916 by Georges Crès, of the collection La Passion de notre frère le Poilu was awarded the Prix Jean-Revel of the Société des Gens de Lettres as best regionalist book, recognizing the singularity of this familiar epic in which humor, fervor and fraternity counterbalance the tragic — a new rimiau raised to the dignity of an ex-voto for the dead of 1914–1918.
The Ferroud edition of 1917 is the great illustrated edition: every page is adorned by Léon Lebègue, with a large folding triptych frontispiece, vignettes and full-page color plates — a precious production that fixed the iconography of the text. This edition also had a hors commerce printing for the society “Les XX,” one of the few books published during the war, and the only one illustrated.
A very fine work, and a very fine copy.