L’Ange garde-chiourme
Paris, Fontaine, “L’Âge d’or”, (June 9) 1946.
1 vol. (120 x 160 mm) of 32 p. White calf, first board mosaic of red, turquoise and royal blue calf motifs, smooth black calf spine, gilt top, cream calf lining with decoration (Rose Adler, gilt. Guy Raphaël, 1951).
First edition.
Cover created by Mario Prassinos based on a drawing by Max Ernst.
One of the first 25 copies on Arches paper.
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
This short text, composed by Prévert in 1930, was initially entitled “Souvenirs de famille ou l’ange garde-chiourme”; it appeared in issue 7 of the December issue of the magazine Bifur. Anti-clerical, anti-militarist and libertarian in inspiration, this violent pamphlet is in the surrealist vein – a group that Prévert assiduously frequented from 1925, before his independence of spirit led him to distance himself from it in the early 1930s. In it, he criticizes the model of the bourgeois family, stigmatizing traditional education, the church and bourgeois morality as threats to the child, the designated victim of adult prejudices and dogmas.
It was followed up for the first time by Fontaine in 1946, and then published on its own in the collection “L’Âge d’or” launched by Max-Pol Fouchet. Jacques Prévert, who was very proud of this short text, then included it in Paroles in 1947.
“We went to bed, and the next day we got up. And so every day the days would line up one after the other, Monday pushing on to Tuesday pushing on to Wednesday and so on through the seasons. The seasons, the wind, the sea, the trees, the birds. The birds, those that sing, that set off on their travels, those that we kill: the birds plucked, gutted, eaten, cooked in poems or nailed to barn doors. Meat too, bread, the priest, mass, my brothers, vegetables, fruit, a sick person, the doctor, the priest, a dead person, the priest, mass for the dead, living leaves, Jesus Christ falls for the first time, the Sun King, the weary pelican, the lowest common multiple, General Dourakine, the little guy, our good angel, Blanche of Castile […], the retreat from Russia, the storming of the Bastille, the asthma of Panama, the arthritis of Russia, hands on the table, J.C. falls for the Nth time, he opens his beak wide and forgets about the cheese to repair the irreparable outrage for years to come…”
The manuscript, bound by P. L. Martin in 1965, was the property of Colonel Daniel Sicklès (sale, in Paris on March 23-24, 1981); it was more recently put up for sale (Sotheby’s, Paris, December 2, 2015, lot 41).
Provenance: Pierre Berès, with the bookshop’s label on the front page; this work appeared in the “original binding exhibition” of 1953, under the number 121, cited as “to Pierre Berès”. The latter was probably the person who commissioned the binding from Rose Adler, whom he met in 1946. “From 1946, Rose Adler gained a loyal customer, who kept her busy until his death in 1959: the bookseller Pierre Berès. A letter she wrote to Madame Solvay leads us to believe that Berès and Rose Adler already knew each other before he started to order bindings from her, and that she did not like him very much: ‘Berès the bookseller suddenly discovered that I had talent, and took my edition of Suzanne et le Pacifique from the yellow calf-bound display window with banknotes. I had to fight him to keep from promising him a Marie Laurencin Fan that I was finishing in pink kidskin with red suede lining. He is very keen to see your bindings, but you will only receive it if you want it. […] He is a man who has had an extraordinary career. All the beautiful pieces go to him, just as the beautiful paintings inevitably end up with Wildenstein. He is very young (…).’ Berès was indeed one of his most important patrons, from the second half of the 1940s onwards. We have identified at least thirty-three bindings that belonged to him, fourteen of which were bought from other bibliophiles” (Alice Caillé, Les reliures de Rose Adler, École nationale des chartes, 2014, p. 334).
Alice Caillé dated this binding to 1953, because of the exhibition in which it was shown: it actually dates from two years earlier, signed in 1951 by Guy Raphaël, the last gilder with whom Rose Adler worked. This would make it, in the inventory of appendices, the oldest of the bindings gilded by Guy Raphaël for Rose Adler (before Carmen, in 1952, Amitié cachetée, Je l’aime elle m’aimait and La Chanson du mal aimé in 1953). The latter had in fact been working with Rose Adler since 1949, but the previous collaborations, perhaps more minor, are not signed with his name. Alice Caillé lists nine that are. “It should nevertheless be pointed out that it is quite likely that the gilders she employed did not systematically sign the bindings they gilded: of the one hundred and forty-five works listed in our catalog, one hundred bear the initials of a gilder, or a little less than 70%. It is therefore possible that, in reality, they gilded more than what we have recorded.” In fact, the bindings gilded by Guy Raphaël are among the rarest, as well as being the most accomplished, as Rose Adler continued to add her personal touch to the binding process.
The Rose Adler collection of the Jacques Doucet Literary Library preserves, under the reference Ms 40-773, a 60-page album, organized as an album of photographs of bindings: The Angel Guard features in it. The subsequent history of the copy is unknown: it does not appear in the Berès sales and it is highly probable that the bookseller subsequently sold it to one of his many customers who were passionate about Rose Adler’s bindings. There were many, particularly in the latter period from 1951 to 1959, “considered, in Rose Adler’s art, as one of renewal of her inspiration, which would have suffered from the crisis and the war. It is true that the technical difficulty of the particular formats she had to bind certainly posed problems that she took pleasure in solving, and that the poetry of several of these works stimulated her mind and her imagination” (Alice Caillé). In July, she received the Legion of Honor.
Alice Caillé, op. cit.; Erwana Brin, La Reliure originale [exhibition, Bibliothèque nationale, January 30-March 1, 1953].
