Description

FIRST EDITION of Paul Claudel's first play, a Symbolist farce with a fairy-tale, poetic and buffoonish atmosphere akin to the A Midsummer Night's Dream.
ONE OF THE FIRST 10 NUMBERED COPIES ON JAPON signed by the author and accompanied by an autograph page - in this case the first page containing the title and characters. Total edition of 130 numbered copies.

Begun in his teens, completed around 1886-1887 and sent to the reading committee of the Théâtre de l'Odéon, L'Endormie was forgotten until the manuscript was rediscovered in 1925. "I started writing when I was about fourteen. A snoop recently found a satirical play in the bear pit at the Odéon.L'Endormie which I must have composed between my fourteenth and fifteenth years. The curious thing is that it was already written in the form of a 'Claudelian verse', as they say in a way that I find rather distasteful.
Edouard Champion told me that he was going to make a few copies of this first work, a photographic reproduction. But I hadn't done anything of my own before I met Rimbaud and was converted."( Literary news, 18 April 1925).

The play was then included in Volume I of the edition of Claudel's theatre published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1947.