In Domaine français. Messages
One of 60 copies on handmade vélin du Marais (copy J among the first ten).
Presentation inscriptions signed by Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet and Raymond Queneau to Gaston Baissette, author of the text “Diderot” in the volume (p. 285 and following).
Curious copy bearing several annotations by Louis Aragon, who signed in ink the presentation text and made a few autograph additions to his poems “La rose et le réséda,” “Les roses de Noël” and “Le conscrit des cent villages”; as well as an ironic “si, j’ose dire / Aragon” added to Julien Benda’s text on Mallarmé and Wagner.
A particularly sought-after publication for the text by Albert Camus who, having just completed a second version of La Peste earlier that year, agreed to supply a short piece, “Les Exilés dans la peste,” for publication by Paulhan and Queneau. Jean Lescure, to whom the text was passed, decided to gather around it this “other anthology (after L’Honneur des poètes, printed clandestinely on 14 July 1943 by Minuit), but in which the works would be signed and the publication entirely normal,” bringing together “everything France had that was most illustrious in the various forms of literature.” The manuscripts were assembled in Paris, then carried into Switzerland by diplomatic pouch, before being printed, in the last days of the year, by Kundig in Geneva. The collection went through more than fifteen reprintings in 1945. Faint marginal foxing.