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Réf : 63635

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Jean GENET

Le condamné à mort

S.n., Fresnes 1942, 14x21,5cm, en feuilles sous couverture rose.

First edition of Jean Genet's first work, written in Fresnes, printed in a handful of copies and self-published, which appeared clandestinely while he was serving a prison sentence for book theft. The thirteen-page, unpaginated booklet was printed on brown paper under a pink or white cover.

Our copy is presented in an old-pink half-box folder, geometrically patterned paper boards, and a case lined with old-pink box, all signed by Thomas Boichot.

“I dedicated this poem to the memory of my friend Maurice Pilorge, whose body and radiant face haunt my sleepless nights...”. Thus Jean Genet explains the genesis of this poem, a tribute to the “20-year-old assassin”, guillotined, whose last forty days he shared. According to Maurice Pilorge's biographer François Sentein (L'Assassin et son bourreau), the two men never really met, and Jean Genet turned him into a fantasized companion, “who died with the insouciance of a dandy” (Edmund White, Jean Genet). Jean Cocteau, who would become Jean Genet's friend and guardian angel - he would save him from life imprisonment a few years later - recounts in his Diary: “Sometimes a miracle happens to me. For example, Jean Genet's Le Condamné à mort. I think there are only four copies in existence. He tore up the rest. This long poem is a splendor. Jean Genet is just out of Fresnes (the booklet is dated from the prison, “Fresnes, September 1942”). An erotic poem in honor of Maurice Pilorge, a twenty-year-old murderer executed on March 12, 1939, in Saint-Brieuc. Genet's eroticism never shocks. His obscenity is never obscene. A grand, magnificent movement dominates everything. The prose that begins is short, insolent, haughty. Perfect style.

An extremely rare and beautiful copy, as issued.

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