The meeting of Customs Officer ROUSSEAU and Alfred JARRY.

[Alfred JARRY – Customs officer ROUSSEAU] – Jean SALTAS (1865.1954)

Signed autograph manuscript.

Nine folio pages on cream paper. Slnd

A memory of Alfred Jarry – How the customs officer Rousseau became a painter.

Truculent fanciful story – seeming to have remained unpublished – of the first meeting of Alfred Jarry and Douanier Rousseau, resembling certain “mystifying” stories of the author of Ubu-roi himself.

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“ […] One day Jarry spent the night at Les Halles accompanied by a few friends including a painter and his model. He was returning home with them in the morning when, crossing the Pont des Arts, they saw an individual on the bank of the Seine walking up and down there. Jarry asked him what he was doing in such a place at such an early hour: “I am a customs officer,” the man replied, “and I am here for my job.” Jarry looked at him fixedly, with a look as deep as he was serious. “My friend,” he said to him, “ you absolutely have the face of a painter and you must paint.” The man first objected that he did not know how to paint and that he doubted he ever would. But Jarry persisted. He repeated to him that he was born to be a painter, that he had genius without suspecting it, that this often happens with artists, that his vocation shone on his face, and to prove it to him on the spot, placing in front of him the easel of the artist who accompanied him, while the model placed himself in the simple apparatus. At the foot of a tree, he ordered her to paint the scene he had before his eyes: Eve in the earthly Paradise, waiting at the foot of the apple tree for her victim, poor Adam, the father of us all.

The unfortunate customs officer was already beginning to believe that in fact he had until then been unaware of his true vocation, Jarry's tone was so persuasive and animated. Brush in hand, he traced on the canvas a semblance of a woman next to a semblance of a tree. However, there remained the question of the apple tree because we know that it was by means of an apple that our mother Eve seduced the first man. The Customs Officer was very embarrassed. Jarry then gave him the advice to take red from his palette, and here and there, in the tree, to indicate the apples by drawing circles, which the obedient student did. […] Jarry was very satisfied with the result , and delighted with the discovery he had made: “it's very good, my friend” he said to the new painter when he had finished. »

However, officers arrive and take everyone to the police station, where a report is drawn up followed by an appearance in court for indecent assault. Jarry pleads the cause of the customs officer’s discovered artistic “genius” so well that the president acquits everyone.

“The customs officer, moved to tears, thanked the magistrate effusively and as a token of his gratitude offered to paint the portrait of his “lady” for New Year’s Day. He also increased his visits for this purpose to the wife of the magistrate who let herself be tempted and ended up agreeing to pose in front of the new artist. […] Douanier Rousseau was now a painter. He did not forget the one who had revealed his vocation to him and had committed him to this great career. When Jarry died, we found at his house in his room on rue Cassette, among the most heterogeneous objects […] a portrait which appeared to be the work of Douanier Rousseau. The figure was replaced by a large hole. It is said that one evening, or rather one morning when he was returning home, Jarry, surprised and frightened at the same time by this image which perhaps resembled him at that moment, had in this place punctured the canvas of 'a punch, a hundred times regrettable sacrilege. […]

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Henri Rousseau, known as the Customs Officer, was born in Laval like Alfred Jarry, in 1844 (around thirty years before his compatriot). If nothing, in fact, seemed to predispose him to painting, it was around 1884 when he became a grant agent in Paris that he devoted himself to drawing and painting. From 1886, he began to exhibit regularly at the Salon des Indépendants. It was around 1894 that Alfred Jarry discovered the Douanier Rousseau, of whom he became a friend and he made this “new” art known in the circles of the Mercure de France , where a laudatory article appeared in particular on The War Exposed to the Independents of 1894. The names of Jarry and Douanier Rousseau now remain universally known and frequently associated.

Doctor Jean Saltas (1865.1954), a Greek doctor and writer born in Turkey, naturalized French in 1900, met Jarry in the Danville living room in 1897. Their association became frequent from 1905, when they collaborated on the translation and adaptation of the novel by the Greek writer Emmanuel Rhodes, La Papesse Joan . During the winter of 1905-1906, Saltas and Jarry worked tirelessly, often in very difficult conditions for Jarry: “He was already very exhausted morally and physically,” Saltas would later recount. He arrived at my house, often in bad weather, in slippers or with pierced shoes, his feet all wet. Taking every precaution to spare his susceptibility, which was great, I slipped a hot brick under his feet, then we worked. It was from this collaboration that La Papesse Jeanne emerged. This was Alfred Jarry's last work. »

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We enclose two autograph tickets from Claude Terrasse to an unknown recipient.

January 21, 1922: “ I have still led an impossible life since October. At the moment I am finishing a play in 3 large acts which must be shown at the Gaîté at the end of February – and the days and nights are barely enough. In addition, we repeat Ubu-roi and Pârius, at the Work and at the Michel. So much so that I don't have a minute to myself. »

February 24, 1922: “ If it amuse you to see Ubu-roi. here are 2 armchairs. »