Les Matinaux

The interest of this group of manuscripts lies in the diversity of the states preserved. While three manuscripts — “Le soleil tourne […]”, “Le Masque funèbre” and “Les Lichens” — are fair copies, several others still bear the traces of the text’s elaboration. “Jouvence des Névons”, “Le Permissionnaire” and “Rougeur des matinaux” show some reworking; “Complainte du lézard amoureux”, “Hermétiques ouvriers” and “Cet amour à tous retiré” are genuine working manuscripts, heavily corrected.

“Cet amour à tous retiré” survives in a particularly developed early state. It includes five unpublished stanzas, flagged as such by a marginal note in pencil, along with numerous deletions and revisions. The manuscript thus allows us to grasp a state earlier than the one preserved by Henry Mathieu, whose variants were recorded in the Pléiade edition.

A similar process of reduction can be seen in “Hermétiques ouvriers”, then still entitled “Doléances du feutre”. The poem had already appeared in 1949 in the Cahiers de la Pléiade, in a form close to that of Les Matinaux. The manuscript’s deletions reveal the work of condensation to which Char subjected his text, notably in its opening lines:

“Marteaux, et vous rusés [?] tonnerres
Hermétiques ouvriers
Pourquoi votre pérennité
Fait cette guerre à mon silence.
En guerre avec mon silence,”

The most significant document is undoubtedly that of “Rougeur des matinaux”, one of the essential aphoristic sequences of the collection. First published in Empédocle in May 1949 with seventeen fragments, then expanded to twenty-seven in Les Matinaux, the text appears here in a markedly earlier state: under its original title, “Georgique des matinaux”, it comprises only eight pieces, with several variants.

It notably includes a fragment that remained unpublished, in which the memory of Char’s companions from the Resistance surfaces directly:

“Les fantômes si mal décrits, les amoureux trop peu fixés,
les révoltés à tort jugés, camarades, seraient vivants si nous étions moins morts nous-mêmes.”

In its final form, “Rougeur des matinaux” would include one of Char’s most celebrated aphorisms: “Impose ta chance, serre ton bonheur et va vers ton risque. À te regarder, ils s’habitueront.” The manuscript preserved here allows us to trace the text back before this final state, to a moment when the sequence, still titled “Georgique des matinaux”, numbered only eight pieces.

The collection brings together poems from the immediate postwar period. Several were written in Provence, at the Rébanqué retreat, where Marcelle Mathieu made available to writers “a small mountain house, simply furnished like a peasant’s cabin.” It was to her son Henry Mathieu that Char would give the manuscript of Les Matinaux.

The rarity of the deluxe paper issue can now be more precisely established. Our research has made it possible to identify four of the six copies on Madagascar paper:

II – Robert Moureau. Copy bound by Pierre-Lucien Martin in 1966, from the library of Robert Moureau (sale 2003, no. 123), then R. & B. Loliée (Paris, April 26, 2016, no. 154).

III – Maurice Houdayer. Binding by Alain Devauchelle, 1996. Copy enriched with two autograph manuscripts by Char, “Les Nuits justes” and “Pourquoi se rendre?”; library of Maurice Houdayer (Paris, Artcurial, March 9, 2021, no. 63).

V – Edmée Maus, then Marcel Zara. The present copy, enriched with nine autograph poems on ten leaves, mounted facing the printed texts. Provenance: Edmée Maus, with her bookplate, then the poetry library of Dr. Marcel Zara (Paris, sale March 20, 2026, no. 214).

A – René Char’s own copy. The single hors commerce copy on Madagascar paper was justified in the poet’s own hand: “mon exemplaire.” It later passed into the Daniel Filipacchi collection (Paris, sale 1995, no. 192).

Copies I and IV remain unlocated to this day. Among the currently documented copies on Madagascar paper, the present copy preserves the most substantial body of manuscripts connected with the collection.

From the library of Edmée Maus (bookplate) and Marcel Zara.

Cahiers de l’Herne, 141; PAB, René Char, 34.