COCTEAU Jean - Lot 69

Lot n° 69
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3000 - 4000 EUR
COCTEAU Jean - Lot 69
COCTEAU Jean Autograph MANUSCRIT,[The Haunted House, 1937]; 35 pages in-4, in a spiral and sheet notebook. Complete manuscript of this impromptu for the Comédie-Française. Cocteau wrote this short piece in verse and prose for the farewell performance of ALBERT-LAMBERT (1865-1941), a member of the Comédie-Française from 1891 to 1935, who had been its dean. It was given on June 25, 1937, but Cocteau, disappointed by the acting, kept the play in his boxes; it was only published in 1985 in issue 10 of the Cahiers Jean Cocteau, and collected in 2003 in the complete Theatre of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. The play features the great heroines of the theatre, each invoking the ghost of their male hero (all roles played by Albert-Lambert); at the end, the ghost of Alceste, Albert-Lambert, appears, happy to no longer be a ghost when leaving this haunted house. The first draft manuscript in verse, abundantly mispronounced and corrected, is written on 13 sheets of a grey cover notebook of sketchbook Drawing of the brand La Reliure Spirale (27 x 21 cm), mainly in black ink and on the front, with corrections and additions in pencil, two of which are developed on the opposite pages. Between the 4th and 5th sheets, Cocteau added 19 loose sheets (21 x 18 cm), in black ink, where he wrote the seven prose tirades of the heroines, successively Agrippina, Jocaste, Phèdre, Chimène, Doña Sol, la Mégère, and Célimène. A full-page pencil drawing appears on the last page of the notebook. It is entitled "Messenger" and represents a young athletic man, his muscles surrounded by strips, his head girded with a laurel wreath. Origin: Carole WEISWEILLER.
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