La Pénitente

First edition, one of 247 numbered copies on laid paper, the only issue after 3 copies on deluxe paper.

Only one copy recorded in the CCF (BnF).

Rare copy of the second play written by the Mauritian author Arthur Martial (1899-1951), one of the notable figures of French-language literature on the island.

Arthur Martial (1899-1951) belonged to the interwar generation which, together with Savinien Mérédac and Clément Charoux, gave Mauritius its so-called « plantation novels ». According to Vicram Ramharai, his 1928 short stories contain some of the earliest appearances of the Indian community in Mauritian fiction. Published in Paris as early as 1929, praised by René Maran for La Poupée de chair (1933), and awarded a prize by the Académie française for Grand Port in 1938, his work is now attracting renewed critical attention. In 2022, the journal Littérature devoted a study to his Sphinx de bronze, a rewriting of Paul et Virginie undertaken « pour en réfuter l'idéologie de romantisme exotique » (Kumari Issur). His theatre remains the least-known part of his oeuvre. La Pénitente, a drama set « à Paris, de nos jours », followed Amour et patrie (1922) and was never reprinted, not even in the 1946 collection En un acte. The booklet was printed by General Printing & Stationery in Port-Louis, which also printed Charoux and Martial's principal works.

A rare, original and never-reprinted dramatic work by a major novelist of interwar Mauritius, issued in just 250 numbered copies, at a time when Francophone criticism is rediscovering his oeuvre.