CHAR (René). Autograph manuscript signed "René Char", entitl - Lot 56

CHAR (René). Autograph manuscript signed "René Char", entitled "L'Extravagant". 2 pp. in-folio on orange peel paper; paper fragile margins frayed with damage to 2 letters. Text published in 1947 in the collection Le Poème pulvérisé, published by the Fontaine review. "He did not move a shadow while advancing, translating an audacity soon consumed, although his step was rather vulgar. Those who, in the early hours of the night, miss their bed and then lose sight of it until the next day, may be tempted by the similarities. They seek to extract themselves from some stones too wise, too hot, want to deliver themselves from the grip of the crystals with fabulous pretensions that the dull walk of the daily life secretes in the places of its choice, with touches of shroud. Such was not this walker that the veil of the lunar landscape, very high, seemed not to obstruct in its movement. The furious frost brushed the surface of his forehead without appearing personal. A road which lengthens, a path which deviates, are in conformity with the impulse of the thought which hums. By the winter night fantastically clean because it was common to the generality of the inhabitants of the universe who did not penetrate it, the last actor was not going to exist anymore. He had lost all link with the ancient volume of the sources favourable to the interrogations, with the happy body that he had liked to animate near his when he could still assign a top to his pleasure, a snow to his talent. Today, he broke with the sadness which had become a hardened object, with the fear of the agreed. The earth had distorted his persuasion, the earth, with its somewhat short speed, with its saffron imagination, its wear cracked by the acts of monsters. Nobody would have to forget it because the usefulness had not assisted him, had not drawn him in full to the look of the others. On the white lime ceiling of his room, a few birds had flown by, but their flash had melted in his sleep. The veil of the lunar landscape, very low now, spreads its aromatic colors above the figure I say. He emerges illuminated from the cold and turns his back forever on the spring that does not exist..." In his "back-history of the Pulverized Poem", René Char proposed this comment, this "confiding margin" to "The Extravagant": "The subject of this poem is an awful circumstance that I do not want to describe, a march to torment. Hypnos filled the dream and discovered the nightmare. (In times of barbarism, the exercise of summary justice through action only results in an almost fatal dismantling of ourselves, leads us to plaintive and crackling questions. But this happens, fortunately, only later, when our conscience has been pulled together, when the ordeal has been overcome, when what was to be saved has actually been saved)."