L'amour baroque - Manuscrit autographe complet signé à la présentation inédite

L'amour baroque [Baroque Love] – Complete signed unpublished autograph presentation manuscript.

Autograph manuscript signed, with edits in black, red, green, purple and blue felt-tip pen on printed scrap paper, with a number of additions, corrections, and deletions.

241 leaves, of which 238 marked with their folio number and 3 unnumbered, various formats (but essentially 4to and 8vo, rectos only with the occasional annotations or collages to verso) in salmon pink covers with title and autograph inscription to the publisher Alex Grall as well as black chemise with autograph titlepiece, signed once more on the inside cover. Leaves with hole-punched perforations.

The complete manuscript of the first version of L'Amour baroque, written between the 18^th December 1969 and 16^th June 1970, and published in April 1971 by René Julliard.
The book, the first in a sentimental trilogy (followed by Y a-t-il un docteur dans la salle ? [Is there a doctor in the house?] and L'Angevine [The Angevin Woman], is in the form of a personal diary. Its dominant theme – love – is one of the author's favorite topics. The narrator, who recounts his passionate encounter with a woman grieving the loss of her daughter, plays with the conventions of the novel – its language is colorful and lively. It's worth remembering that the works of René Fallet, with their florid style marked by Rabelais, Molière and Marcel Aymé, in their turn inspired the films of Michel Audiard, René Clair and Jean Girault.
This manuscript, presented by René Fallet to the publisher Alex Grall, should not be mistaken for just an ordinary manuscript. It is, rather, a creative physical object mixing visual tricks, word games, collages and sketches (flowers, naked women, grotesque features) in color on a multitude of bits of scrap paper. In fact, Fallet gathered together numerous leaves of headed paper (ORTF, Radiodiffusion and Belgian TV, The French Communist Party, Denoël and Gallimard the publishers, Dépêche TV, Miroir du Cyclisme, L'Équipe, First National City Bank, The French Mythological Society, the Hotel Intercontinental in Düsseldorf, Belgian National Railways, Ministry of Social Services and others) that he's used here as background to his manuscript to give a dynamic, graphic effect. He also uses the back of advertising fliers (Paic washing up liquid, Kleenex tissues), original press photos (pack photos in the Paris-Roubaix amateur cycling competition, a scene of Tom Wesselmann admiring naked ladies), publicity photos for films (Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut with Julie Christie and Oskar Werner), dust jackets (Les Milanais tuent le samedi [The Milanese Kill on a Saturday] by Giorgio Scerbanenco, SAS by Gérard de Villiers, Ils ne pensent qu'à ça [They think of nothing else] by Georges Wolinski), record sleeves (Let it be by the Beatles), pictures from erotic magazines or cartoons (Jean-Jacques Sempé). The entire ensemble is enriched with collages (“French students read a lot of Camus”), not to mention several portraits of himself, including an original photograph of him with Georges Brassens and most notably a nude self-portrait!
Taken together, the work consciously presents a joyful, effusive and caustic portrait of popular culture at the turn of the 1960s and 70s. Fallet, a distinctly colorful character, who self-defined as an “windscreen-wiper anarchist, going from left to right”, took a mischievous pleasure in subverting – with plenty of humor – certain archetypes of modernity (the pin-up, the housewife, the perfect couple, the sportsman, etc.), not without referencing certain movements in contemporary art (Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme).
The manuscript shows important differences with the printed text. From a structural point of view, for instance, Fallet modified the demarcations of his 106 chapters, which were organized into three parts in the printed version. He also altered the text in terms of the narrative, the author playing with the names of his characters, each having several different appellations: thus, the husband of the heroine – sometimes known as Jean-Louis in the manuscript – becomes Jean-Claude in the end. Furthermore, Fallet reserved his margins for corrections, but also for numbering lines and above all for marking the date of composition of each section. Thus, we can follow his magisterial progress in the writing process day by day from 18^th December 1969 to 16 June 1970. The final leaf, unnumbered, is composed of a list of sections to revise.
Last but not least, the manuscript reveals that the inspiration for this tale of amorous passion is none other than Mette Ivers, an illustrator with whom Fallet would work and incidentally the wife of Sempé, whose name features very heavily on the versos of the leaves and in the margins.

A superb manuscript, remarkably made by René Fallet into a veritable physical object.