Les Cloches sur le coeur
Illustrated with three full-page compositions by Louis Serrières-Renoux.
One of 150 copies on laid paper, the only printing apart from three copies on Lafuma (no. 61).
Signed presentation inscription: “À Michel Rousselot, homme de sac et de corde, d'une main sûre pour qu'il colle à la balle. Son ami, René Char.”
A precious copy enriched with the autograph manuscript of the last poem in the collection, “pour une vierge,” signed and dated 10 October 1927 — one of the last poems composed, in the autumn, before the collection was finalized.
Printed in only 153 copies, this collection is of great rarity: René Char destroyed nearly the entire print run, disavowing this juvenile production: “its title soon became hateful to me; but in truth, behind that title were poems I was scarcely proud of.” The fate of these thirty-eight poems, written between 1925 and 1927 — juvenilia composed between his eighteenth and twentieth years — is singular and harsh: Char would no longer mention it in the bibliography he later established for himself, which he chose to begin with Arsenal.
Manuscripts by René Char from this period are extremely rare, and no manuscript of this collection — his first — is known; the few surviving manuscripts of individual poems have been dispersed among various volumes.
It was in Nîmes, where René Char was completing an eighteen-month military service in an artillery regiment from 1927, that he set to work composing the collection. He finished shaping it in the autumn of 1927; its publication, at the author’s expense, was arranged through a small Paris publishing house that also issued a literary journal, Le Rouge et le Noir, to which Char had regularly contributed between 1925 and 1927 — one of the poems in Les Cloches, “Ravage de la Lune,” had already appeared there, and Char dedicated “Sonatine,” one of the last poems composed, to the journal’s editor, Henri Lamblin.
The volumes, printed on “the presses of Albert de Mallortie, master printer in Roubaix,” were delivered to him in Nîmes in May 1928. The edition is illustrated with three full-page drawings by Louis Serrières-Renoux, a surveyor and, for a time, a fellow artilleryman with Char at Nîmes. Serrières-Renoux also designed the cover of the short-lived review Méridiens, founded by the poet in 1929 and which lasted only three issues.
The inscribed copies of Les Cloches sur le cœur reflect the intellectual circle of the young René Char: poets who, like him, contributed to the little literary reviews of the period — Jean Gleizes (Nîmes, May 1928), Lucien Franchi (Marseille, 1928), Maurice Courtois-Suffit (Nîmes, May 1928), André Cayatte (Nîmes, May 1928), Julien Lanoë (place not indicated, June 1928) and Armel Ferrand (Nîmes, July 1928, with two manuscripts); only one dedication is known to an established poet, Jules Supervielle (Nîmes, May 1928). Char later gave three further copies: to Yves and Jeannette Tanguy (in 1946), to Paul Éluard (in 1947) and to Yves Breton (in 1951).
A very fine copy, enriched with one of René Char’s earliest known autograph manuscripts.