À une sérénité crispée
One of the copies on vélin Plumex (no. 3252), this one from the hors commerce issue.
Signed presentation inscription: “Exemplaire de Maria Casarès, avec un amitié meilleure que l'écriture. René Char.”
An important collection by René Char, of which he would publish a revised version in 1963.
A precious copy belonging to Maria Casarès, Albert Camus’s mistress and great love.
Their love affair was intensely romantic, their correspondence wildly passionate. Camus was thirty in 1944 when he met Maria Casarès, then just twenty-one. He had published L’Étranger in 1942 and was editing the Resistance newspaper Combat. She had just left the Conservatoire and was performing in his play Le Malentendu at the Théâtre des Mathurins. Their affair began precisely on the day of the Normandy landings, 6 June 1944. Casarès ended it soon after, in October 1944, when Francine returned to Paris pregnant with twins, Jean and Catherine. It resumed five years later, on 6 June 1948: walking with a friend on the boulevard Saint-Germain, Maria suddenly stopped, breathless, and turned to find Camus looking back at her. “In the same position, behind me, a step away, like a reflection in a mirror, Camus had turned toward me and was looking at me,” she recalled. Their affair resumed, clandestine, an absolute love that both placed above all else. “This total surrender of one heart to another, this quiet fullness of the soul, is at least our victory and our reward,” Camus assured her in 1950, also writing: “Life has no other face than yours.”
Over fifteen years, Camus and Casarès exchanged at least 865 letters, pneumatic messages and telegrams. After Camus’s tragic death on 4 January 1960, René Char, his neighbor, went to the small apartment Camus had kept on the rue de Chanaleilles and took Maria Casarès’s letters to bring them to her, in order to protect the couple’s families. She would not meet Catherine Camus, the writer’s daughter, until 1980, after the death of Francine, Catherine’s mother. She sold her the letters some years later, and they were published in 2017.
Throughout these clandestine years, René Char remained the person closest to both Camus and Casarès. Both men continually gave the actress their books — some twenty titles each. Char’s books are likewise preserved for the most part at the Fonds de la Maison Maria Casarès in Alloue, Charente.
This copy, of one of the poet’s important titles, is a moving witness to the constant and faithful friendship between them.
Maria Casarès annotated the copy extensively, with numerous aphorisms underlined in the margins.
A very fine copy. Publisher’s insert preserved.