La Confession de Lemuel
Inscribed and signed: “à Monsieur S.C. Lecomte, hommage respectueux, O.V. de L. Milosz.”
Milosz remains one of the great solitary figures of early twentieth-century French literature. A French-language poet born in 1877 in the former Russian Empire, descended from an old Polish-Lithuanian family, he was by turns a novelist, playwright, religious thinker and, later, a diplomat in the service of Lithuania.
La Confession de Lemuel dates from the period following the decisive spiritual crisis Milosz underwent on 14 December 1914, a night of illumination that he would later describe as marking a clear divide between his life and work before and after.
This copy is inscribed to Sébastien-Charles Lecomte, a French poet born in 1860 and died in 1934, a regular contributor to numerous poetry journals in the early twentieth century, and president of the Société des poètes français — an association founded in 1902 on the centenary of the birth of Victor Hugo by José-Maria de Heredia, Sully Prudhomme, Léon Dierx and Alcanter de Brahm. A poetry prize now bears his name, the “prix S.C. Lecomte.”