Jean Cocteau - Le rappel à l'ordre ( Envoi + Dessin- É.O.-Povenance-Reliure Art Déco] - 1926

Jean Cocteau

Le Rappel à L'Ordre

Paris, Plon, 1926, in-12 of 296pp

FIRST EDITION on Marais paper

Copy adorned with an autograph dedication and an original drawing by the author on the half-title addressed to the French novelist and poet Guy d’Arcangues, born May 31, 1924 in Paris and died September 22, 2004 in Biarritz.

Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais were very close friends of Guy d’Arcangues and loyal hosts at the château.

Guy d’Arcangues is the son of Pierre d’Arcangues (1887-1973), who for forty years was the mayor of the village of the French Basque Country that bears his name and of whom he actively helped to shape its appearance, and of Maria Luisa de Aramayo.

Guy d’Arcangues was deeply marked by the war years. He was only 17 when he faced the German troops occupying the family château alone. He recounts this period in an emotional novel, Les Tambours de septembre, published shortly after his death. Later, he was imprisoned at Fort du Hâ in Bordeaux, before being deported to a forced labor camp in Silesia in place of his father, who was also incarcerated. A play, Le Héros, and especially a magnificent memoir, Le Silésien, bear witness to this ordeal.

After the war, Guy d’Arcangues was the young artistic director of the casinos in Biarritz, before becoming a journalist for Paris Match, Vogue, Le Temps de Paris, Adam or Jours de France in the 1960s. President of the tourism and fêtes committee of Biarritz between 1971 and 1977, he rejuvenated the city’s tourism by inviting prestigious guests such as Frank Sinatra.

An essential figure of the Basque gentry throughout the second half of the 20th century, Guy d’Arcangues nevertheless never abandoned writing, regularly confiding in a diary that remains unpublished after nearly sixty years. But it is especially through poetry that he found his main source of inspiration, alternately indulging in light and elegant observations or more contemplative descriptions, which sketch another, nuanced portrait of the man who called himself an “opportunist.”

Guy d’Arcangues rests in the Arcangues cemetery.

In Le Rappel à l’ordre (1926), Jean Cocteau describes his own conception of poetry. For him, the poet makes the known emerge in the form of the unknown, “that which his heart, his eye glide over each day, from an angle and at a speed such that he seems to see it and be moved by it for the first time.”

This critical volume gathers in 1926 various texts published mainly between 1918 and 1923: Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918), a short essay on music augmented by an “Appendix” (1917-1925); Carte blanche (1919); Visites à Maurice Barrès (1921); Le Secret professionnel (1922); D’un ordre considéré comme une anarchie (1923); “Autour de Thomas l’imposteur” (1923); Picasso (1923).

Their common thread is defined by the overall title, illuminated by the title of the lecture at the Collège de France: “Of an order considered as an anarchism.” In all these critical texts, the writer defends a living classicism, an order, but within which individuals can express themselves without losing their originality, a “discipline of freedom” without which individual anarchy becomes harmful.

Half-leather binding with raised bands, smooth spine adorned with black bands, gilt title and author, red head, covers and spine preserved

Ex-libris of the Château d’Arcangues

The genealogy of this family belonging to the French nobility goes back to the year 1516. In 1782 King Louis XVI authorized them to bear the Spanish title of Marquis d’Iranda following an alliance. In 1789 they took part in the nobility assemblies of Labourd. In 1863 Emperor Napoleon III confirmed the authorization of the title of Marquis d’Iranda. The title of Marquis d’Arcangues is a courtesy title, neither the fief nor the château of Arcangues having ever been erected into a marquisate.