Pasiphaë
One of 380 copies on alfa paper (no. 68).
Signed presentation inscription: “À Maurice Martin du Gard, souvenir de Montherlant.”
Publisher's insert with subscription form preserved.
A short dramatic poem inspired by the Cretan myth, Pasiphaë depicts the wife of Minos, seized by the monstrous desire inspired in her by the gods for the white bull. Confronted by her nurse, Pasiphaë nonetheless refuses shame and claims her passion as a fatality superior to human laws.
The text was originally intended to belong to a larger tragedy, Les Crétois, begun in the late 1920s and left unfinished. Montherlant extracted this fragment, which he described as a “dramatic poem.”
Published in Tunis by Armand Guibert in the Cahiers de Barbarie, Pasiphaë also testifies to the literary vitality of this cosmopolitan series, which in the 1930s published texts by Milosz, Patrice de La Tour du Pin, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo and Roy Campbell. The play was not staged until two years later, before being revived at Avignon and then at the Comédie-Française.