Alfred Jarry.

Albert Samain. No place or date [1905-1907?] Autograph fragment of 19 pages small in-4 [20 x 14,8 cm], numbered, mounted on tabs on strong paper, soft black morocco, folder, case (Loutrel). Important autograph fragment of Jarry's last work offering unpublished variants. Its writing is situated between the first draft and the final manuscript. It contains numerous variants, corrections and erasures by hand. Like the first draft, it is incomplete: page 18 is missing, as well as several pages at the end. It was described second-hand by the publishers of the Pléiade according to the catalogue of the 1953 Expojarrysition (n° 454). The definitive manuscript, known from a 1939 auction catalogue, comprises 37 pages. The somewhat distorted portrait of one of the founders of the Mercure de France was published on 10 May 1907 by the autograph dealer Victor Lamasle. Jarry evokes "his early years in Paris, and attempts, with concision and meticulousness, to portray a generation of writers, his own, who were twenty years old in 1892-1893, multiplying, but never naming himself, allusions to his own existence. Much more than Samain, it is Jarry the hero of these pages that he haunts, a ghost in the background" (Patrick Besnier in Jarry, Oeuvres complètes III, p. 919).