« Ma trisaïeule »

An apparently unpublished text, which does not appear, to our knowledge, in any published work of Jean Richepin. The document is a working manuscript, extensively corrected: deletions, reworkings and autograph additions allow the elaboration of the text to be traced through to its final state.

Poet, novelist and playwright, Jean Richepin was one of the most turbulent figures in French letters at the end of the nineteenth century. The publication of La Chanson des gueux in 1876 earned him a conviction for offending public morals, but firmly established his reputation as the poet of outcasts, vagabonds and rebels. His election to the Académie française, where he was received by Maurice Barrès in 1909, has sometimes obscured this rebellious side of his work.

Georges Brassens knew how to rediscover it. He set to music, among others, Les Philistins and Les Oiseaux de passage, giving new life to verses in which Richepin opposes the poet’s freedom to bourgeois conformism. René Fallet amusingly summed up this rediscovery: “He had a beard and belonged to the Académie française, which does not exactly inspire confidence in a poet — especially the Académie. Yet Brassens found in the work of this apparent conformist a fine war cry against the ‘bourgeois.’”

A fine unpublished autograph manuscript, in perfect condition.