LAFORGUE (Jules).

Lot 94
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Estimation :
1200 - 1800 EUR
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Result : 1 690EUR
LAFORGUE (Jules).
SINCERE ANXIETY. AUTOGRAPHIC POEM, dated Nuit du 4 juin [1880], 2 pages in-8 (190 x 138 mm) on a bifold sheet of tissue paper, in a modern black half-maroquin folder. WORK MANUSCRIPT of a poem intended for the collection Le Sanglot de la Terre, a project abandoned by Laforgue in 1882. It was not published until 1980, in the edition of Poésies complètes established by Pascal Pia. Laforgue had first entitled this long poem of sixty lines La Grande Angoisse, then Angoisse sincère. Expressing a deep pessimism, Pascal Pia was able to remark that "it was in rather dark days that all Laforgue's 'philosophical' poems were written and rewritten". The cosmic inspiration that manifests itself there reinforces this fundamental pessimism, close to nihilism: May everything finally collapse in the great debacle! Let the last moan be heard! No more hours, no more echoes, no witnesses, no spectacle, and may it be the Night, irrevocably! For if no one sees everything, what good is Existence, And thought? Love? and Reality? Why Life? and not the universal Silence Filling forever the Unlimited Void Various erasures show that this manuscript, which was not a first draft, has still been very much reworked. There are many variations. Another version of the poem is kept at the Jacques Doucet Literary Library. Poésies complètes, Lausanne, L'Âge d'Homme, 1986, t. I, pp. 288-290, with mention of this manuscript in the notes, p. 290. See lot no. 88, for a letter from Huysmans on Laforgue. Small lack of paper on the 2nd page, with lack of text at the end of the last verses.
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