Description

FIRST COLLECTIVE EDITION, PART ORIGINAL, Jules Boissière's unpublished works, published posthumously by his widow Thérèse Boissières.
One of the first 120 copies on Hollandesigned by Térèse Boissière and reserved for subscribers.
Beautiful cover illustrated by Géo Dorival.

Words from an intoxicated person and The Bonze Kou-Su were both published in Hanoi in 1890 in the form of booklets; the first, signed with the pseudonym "Khou Mi, guardian of the pagoda"was not commercially available. The unfinished novel Land of fever and the Road book by Boissière appear in this collection for the first time.

A poet with the Société des Félibres, Jules Boissière went to Indochina in 1886 to work as a colonial civil servant. Interested in Annamite and Chinese cultures, he learnt Vietnamese (in addition to some 3,000 ideograms), asked to be stationed away from towns that were too westernised for his taste and began to frequent opium dens, where he managed to establish contact with the local populations. Boissière published a book on the subject in 1895, Opium smokerswhich was a curiosity in France and became the representative of the first 'wave' of literature on opium written in the colonies.