L’Intelligence et l’échafaud
One of eleven copies on Hollande paper, from the deluxe issue (no. 5).
L’intelligence et l’échafaud first appeared in the journal Confluences, in its July 1943 issue. Its characters, Camus writes, “are curious heroes who all perish of feeling and go looking for mortal illnesses in thwarted passions,” in keeping with a French novelistic tradition that goes straight to the point, following the model of La Princesse de Clèves. From its author, Madame de Lafayette, through Benjamin Constant and on to Proust, the text is entirely grounded in an admiration for classical art. Camus would return to this theme two years later in his preface to the works of Chamfort, and echoed it in several of his 1944 editorials for Combat: that of 12 October 1944 repeats the Goethe maxim quoted here, “Better an injustice than disorder.”
This booklet was completed on 14 January 1960, just ten days after Camus’s accidental death on the roads of Burgundy. Printed in only 51 copies, it appeared simultaneously with another tribute issued by Pierre Aelberts for his “Brimborions” series, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Albert Camus.
Rare on deluxe paper.