CHAR (René Émile). - Lot 75

CHAR (René Émile). Les Cloches sur le cœur. With drawings by Louis Serrière-Renoux. [Paris]: Le Rouge et le Noir, 1928. -In-16, 161x124: 63 pp. (4 ff.), printed cover. Red half-chagrin, smooth spine decorated with cold filets, untrimmed, cover and spine preserved (later binding). Very rare first edition of René Char's first collection. It is illustrated with three full-page black compositions by Louis Serrière-Renoux. "These thirty-nine poems partly reflect the author's Marseilles experience of 1925-1926 - nightlife, bars and girls in the Old Port - but their writing extended to his early life as an artilleryman in Nîmes. Les Cloches sur le cœur also marks the bereavement of his father and the agony, in 1926, of his maternal grandmother, one of the protective figures of the poet's childhood. The loss of these "dear presences" gives way to death, producing an atmosphere of mocking morbidity. The dedicatees of the poems, the first readers of Les Cloches, greeted this 'bizarre, irritating and delightful' book with some reservations" (Antoine Coron, René Char, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2007, p. 26). Edition of 153 copies, many of which were destroyed by the author, who disowned the work. This is one of 150 on laid paper, and more precisely of 125 numbered in Arabic numerals (no. 55). A good copy in a later binding. Spine faded. Provenance: Georges Auguste Dormeuil, with bookplate.