Le Chien de coeur

In May 1968, apart from the events shaking France, René Char suffered a heart attack. From this experience he drew the poems of Le Chien de cœur, published a year later, evoking in the opening text the night that nearly carried him away: “In the night of 3 to 4 May 1968, the lightning I had so often watched with envy in the sky burst inside my head, offering me, against a background of darkness peculiarly my own, the airy face of the flash borrowed from the most material of storms. I thought death was coming, but a death in which, filled with an unprecedented understanding, I would still have one more step to take before falling asleep, before being scattered forever into the universe. The dog of the heart had not whimpered.” All the poems were written between June and August 1968, with the exception of “Outrages.”

For its illustration, Char turned to Joan Miró, who created a frontispiece for the book: some hundred original lithographs were printed, all signed, to accompany the copies of the deluxe issue, consisting of 95 copies printed on vélin d’Arches. In addition, [21] hors commerce copies were printed on various papers, of which 5 on Arches paper and 1 on gray vellum (Char’s own copy) with the lithograph, and, without it, 2 on pink laid rag paper, 5 on gray vellum and 15 on green vellum.

The 5 Arches copies are lettered A to E, the pink laid-paper copies F and G, the green vellum copies H to O (the pink and green copies under a blue wrapper), and the gray vellum copies I to VI — Char’s own copy, the only one with the lithograph, being the first of these.

790 copies were also printed on Robertsau offset paper, for which Miró’s frontispiece is reproduced only in outline.

Coron, 510.