La Pluie et le beau temps
Signed presentation inscription: “À Maurice Martin du Gard, avec les meilleures sympathies de Gustave Kahn.”
Published after Les Palais nomades, Chansons d’amant and Domaine de fée, this collection belongs to the period of Kahn’s early experiments with free verse, of which he was one of the principal practitioners and theorists.
Its publication also occasioned, in 1896, a banquet at which Mallarmé proposed a toast in the poet’s honor.
Copy inscribed to Maurice Martin du Gard (1896–1970), co-founder of Les Nouvelles littéraires in 1922 and author of Les Mémorables. Born in the year the collection was published, the recipient necessarily received this inscription much later. The copy thus brings together a figure from the early years of Symbolism and one of the chroniclers of literary life between the wars.
André Beaunier, La Poésie nouvelle, 1902, chapter “Gustave Kahn”; Gustave Kahn, Symbolistes et Décadents, 1902.