Description

ORIGINAL EDITION with a frontispiece by Max Ernst.
ONE OF 490 NUMBERED COPIES ON ESPARTO, last large paper edition, after 11 copies on madagascar and 21 copies on hollande de Rives.

Inscribed and signed by the author :

à my friend Janine
in memory of her
in memory of me
Paul Éluard

Complete with insert.

A novelist, critic and journalist, Janine Bouissounouse was General Secretary of La revue du cinéma ; she first rubbed shoulders with the Philosophies before moving closer to the Surrealists. "An admirer of Eluard, she knows all his texts". She met him in November 1926, when a 'surrealist' dance performance at the Comédie des Champs Elysées aroused the ire of the 'true surrealists'. They interrupted the performance before being taken to the police station. (Vanoyeke, Violaine. Paul Éluard. The poet of freedom. Biography. 1995)
After the Second World War, Eluard was invited to Rome, where Janine Bouissounouse was living, to stay with her and enable her to make contact with the Communist and Socialist intelligentsia and the arts world, which was to have an impact on the rest of her journalistic and political career, establishing her role as a cultural mediator between France and Italy (Forlin, Olivier, French intellectuals and Italy, 1945-1955. L'Harmattan, 2006. pp.26-31)
Janine Bouissounous published several articles on her memories of Eluard, including When Paul Eluard told me his dreams  (Le Figaro Littérairen°1126, 13-19 November 1967, pp. 10-11).