Le lit la table

First illustrated edition with twelve full-page plates by Gérard Vulliamy, one of a thousand numbered copies on cream laid paper.

Original wrappers with flaps. Wrapper very slightly creased, otherwise a fine copy. Ex-dono inscription on the half-title.

In the same year as the publication of the present work, 1946, Gérard Vulliamy became Paul Éluard’s son-in-law by marrying Cécile, the poet’s daughter with Gala; the two men had known each other since 1938, however, within Surrealist circles. Éluard stayed from 1943 at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital, which at the time sheltered Jews and members of the Resistance. Vulliamy subsequently stayed there as well, giving rise to their first joint work, the illustrated collection of poems published in 1946 under the title Souvenirs de la maison des fous. Vulliamy’s illustrated version of Le lit la table, published in the “Le Point d’Or” series that the publisher François Lachenal had just entrusted to Paul Éluard, thus represents a second collaboration between the poet and the painter.

The two collections thus appeared at a pivotal moment in the poet’s life: during a stay in Switzerland in November 1946, Paul Éluard received a telephone call informing him of the sudden death of Nusch, his wife and muse. The collections he published afterward mark a turning point in his love poetry, as his most intimate compositions gradually lost their lightness and Surrealist resonance to become more sober and direct. He also continued his work as a politically engaged poet, already evident in Le lit la table in the poem “Critique de la poésie”, devoted to poets who fell victim to the Nazis and Franco’s regime. Composed before Nusch’s death, Le lit la table still contains poems of a more sensory vein: “Les sens”, in particular, still employs the register of love poetry, with its olfactory and tactile motifs and the image of the beloved body merging into nature.

One of the last poetry collections Paul Éluard composed during Nusch’s lifetime, the present illustrated edition appearing the very year of her death, from the pencil of a painter close to the Surrealists who, that same year, became the poet’s son-in-law.