L’Amour la poésie
One of the printed review copies.
Inscribed and signed: “à Drieu, Paul Éluard.”
Éluard always had a genius for titles, and L’Amour la Poésie is no exception. It follows Capitale de la douleur and includes the famous line “La Terre est bleue comme une orange” (the opening line of the seventh poem in the first chapter, “Premièrement”). The book is dedicated “à Gala, ce livre sans fin.”
A precious copy inscribed to Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, an early fellow traveler of the Surrealist group. This was despite Drieu’s break with the group in August 1925, marked by an open letter, “La véritable erreur des surréalistes,” published in La Nouvelle Revue française, accusing the Surrealists of adopting a political stance as rigid and encumbered as the neo-classicism they claimed to oppose.
Aragon, once his inseparable friend, replied in September, bitterly denouncing Drieu’s new alliances and declaring him lost: “Tu t’en vas, tu t’effaces… ombre, va-t’en, adieu.”
The break with Éluard was less abrupt, but became real after the Spanish Civil War and especially from 1939 onward. Éluard firmly rebuffed a final attempt at reconciliation from Drieu in September 1942, writing that he could no longer feel esteem for a man whose views held innocent men, women and children responsible for supposed “crimes”: “J’ai trop de cousins!”