La Voix humaine

La Voix humaine [The Human Voice]
First edition, one of 525 numbered copies on Marais pur-fil paper, ours is one the 25 hors commerce copies.

Bound in half black morocco, spine in five compartments, gilt date at the foot, gilt fillet on the decorative paper boards, covers and spine preserved, top edge gilt, binding signed by Goy & Vilaine.
A beautiful handwritten inscription signed by Jean Cocteau to the gay crooner Francis Robert Halma, said Max Trébor: « à mon très cher Marc Trébor qui chante comme écrivait Baudelaire et qui m'émeut toujours. Bien que très coupé le disque vaut mieux que le livre. Demandez-le chez Columbia » (“To my very dear Marc Trébor who sings as Baudelaire wrote
and who always moves me. Although very much cut, the record is better than the book. Ask for it at Columbia”) enriched with a beautiful drawing in black ink representing a young man in profile and lightly enhanced in blue pencil.

Cocteau refers to the recording of La Voix humaine by Simone Signoret, who
accepted the role on the condition that it will be recorded in the same manner as the original character. As a result, she used her own apartment as well as her own telephone to play this terrible breakup. The microphone was set up in the kitchen. It only took one take but Signoret was so affected by this experience that she refused for a long time to consent to the broadcast of this "intimate unravelling". She was finally convinced by friend and fellow actor Yves Montand who was stunned by this performance. Simone Signoret received the Grand Prix de l'Académie du Disque for her interpretation of La Voix humaine.

At the time of the first performance in 1930, L'écho de Paris had already predicted its success: "The best actresses in the world will want to perform La Voix humaine.”

Berthe Bovy, Anna Magnani, Simone Signoret, Ingrid Bergman, Sophia Loren, Ornella Muti, Tilda Swinton... and opera singers Denise Duval and Felicity Lott followed one another on stage and on screen, while the greatest directors and composers took up the challenge of staging this atypical work. Among them were Roberto Rossellini, Francis Poulenc and Pedro Almodovar, who owes his most acclaimed film Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios to Cocteau's play.

Acting as a one-voice dialogue, this variation on the expectations, desires and pains of a woman enduring a telephone break-up confronts the actress with the deafening silence of the telephone receiver. The tragedy offers to the spectator a victim suffering the inaudible assaults of an invisible torturer. The decomposed female voice seems simultaneously strong, fragile, proud and destroyed. While the other voice is absent, it strikes nonetheless the spectator's imagination by what Cocteau calls: "The eternity of silences".

A very fine and perfectly preserved copy.