Jean Cocteau. The Child Thieves. Manuscript decorated with original drawings.

Jean Cocteau (1889.1963)

Autograph manuscript, signed with a star – The Child Thieves.

A page in-4°. Slight marginal defects. Slnd. [1926]

Manuscript decorated with seven original full-page drawings.

Formidable poetic manuscript – first draft – comprising around thirty verses written in all directions, largely corrected and crossed out, and signed with a star. These verses present five variants – which have remained unpublished – of the last quatrain of the poem Les Voleurs d'enfants published in his collection Opéra , in 1927, by Stock.

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Cocteau composes, corrects and models his poetry endlessly:

The dream of flying accustoms us

The child hovers over a memory

This flight awakens a memory

The child dreams of a statue

Who beckons him to come

Near a fallen fence

He dreams in vague memories

Always the same: a statue

It's evening... a statue

Beckons him to come

… 

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The manuscript is enriched with seven original drawings.

At the top of the sheet: a group of six male figures (three full silhouettes and three faces) appearing to play pétanque. We can see the face of the musician and friend of Cocteau, Georges Auric.

At the bottom of the page: an enhanced portrait of the painter and decorator Christian Bérard illustrated here, not very advantageously, as a naked dancer. A pencil note reads: “Christian Bérard before the beard”. Remember that Bérard illustrated the cover of the Opéra .