COCTEAU Jean (1889-1963)

Let us find our childhood Autograph manuscript signed S.l., 1935, 134 pages in-4 in ink. Important manuscript of reportage poetry, telling of a cruise off the French Riviera with Marcel Khill, from Villefranche-sur-Mer to Toulon, evoking old stays with Radiguet and his friends. At the end of July 1935, Cocteau leaves Villefranche-sur-Mer on a fishing boat with Marcel Khill; they arrive in Toulon on August 8th, after having traveled along the coast and passed through Cannes, the islands of Lérins, Saint-Tropez, Port-Cros, Porquerolles, and Saint-Mandrier, and met many friends: Daisy Fellowes, Colette, Joseph Kessel, Moïse Kisling, and Jean Desbordes. But Cocteau projects a nostalgic memory of these places, evoking the heroic days of the Welcome Hotel in Villefranche with Christian Bérard and Igor Stravinsky, and the vacations in Lavandou and Pramousquier with Raymond Radiguet. This report was published in ten articles in Paris-Soir, from August 6 to 16, 1935. The manuscript shows that Cocteau had planned to put these articles together in a volume; they were not published in volume until 1973, by Pierre Chanel, in Poésie de journalisme (Pierre Belfond, 1973). The manuscripts, in first draft, present numerous corrections, with important variants and unpublished passages; it is the newspaper which carried out, it seems, the reorganizations and cuts. It must be missing about ten pages at the beginning of the manuscript, which presents moreover very numerous framed titles (we will quote only some of them), cutting the text in sequences, titles removed in the publication.