(Louis-Ferdinand CÉLINE) Edith FOLLET
Rare et inédit portrait en tondo d'Edith Follet
Reullinger|Paris circa 1920|-|Photographie|diamètre 11 cm
Rare and unpublished tondo portrait of Edith Follet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline's second wife, whom he married in 1919, on albumen paper mounted on Reullinger studio cardboard.
The photograph has a repaired marginal tear and manuscript captions "Édith Follet" "1920" inscribed on the verso.
This very elegant portrait of the illustrator Edith Follet, unpublished to our knowledge, dates from the early 1920s and puts a face to the "graceful brunette of cold distinction," who illustrated Céline's medical thesis, often considered his very first book, foreshadowing Voyage au bout de la nuit.
Céline met Édith Follet in 1918 through the young woman's father, the highly respected Rennes doctor Athanase Follet. En route to his first awareness tours against tuberculosis within the Rockefeller mission, Céline dined at the doctor's home in the company of his charming daughter:
"Il avait des yeux extraordinaires, d'un bleu qui changeait selon ses sentiments.
Quand il était contrarié, son regard s'éclaircissait. Ce grand garçon d'un mètre quatre-vingts me donnait l'impression d'être un homme" ["He had extraordinary eyes, of a blue that changed according to his feelings. When he was upset, his gaze would lighten. This tall young man of six feet gave me the impression of being a man"], she confided sixty-eight years later. After his baccalaureate and months of chaste tête-à-têtes with the young woman five years his junior, Louis Destouches married Édith Follet on August 10, 1919 in Quintin.
The photograph has a repaired marginal tear and manuscript captions "Édith Follet" "1920" inscribed on the verso.
This very elegant portrait of the illustrator Edith Follet, unpublished to our knowledge, dates from the early 1920s and puts a face to the "graceful brunette of cold distinction," who illustrated Céline's medical thesis, often considered his very first book, foreshadowing Voyage au bout de la nuit.
Céline met Édith Follet in 1918 through the young woman's father, the highly respected Rennes doctor Athanase Follet. En route to his first awareness tours against tuberculosis within the Rockefeller mission, Céline dined at the doctor's home in the company of his charming daughter:
"Il avait des yeux extraordinaires, d'un bleu qui changeait selon ses sentiments.
Quand il était contrarié, son regard s'éclaircissait. Ce grand garçon d'un mètre quatre-vingts me donnait l'impression d'être un homme" ["He had extraordinary eyes, of a blue that changed according to his feelings. When he was upset, his gaze would lighten. This tall young man of six feet gave me the impression of being a man"], she confided sixty-eight years later. After his baccalaureate and months of chaste tête-à-têtes with the young woman five years his junior, Louis Destouches married Édith Follet on August 10, 1919 in Quintin.
€2,500