Louis ARAGON (1897-1982). Autograph manuscript signed, Madame à sa tour monte; 9pages in-fol. (minor wear to fold on last leaf). First version of the tale published in Le libertinage (Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française, 1924). Significant variants from the published text. According to Aragon ("Avant-lire" in the 1977 edition), this first version dates from 1919; he adds: "I have perhaps never in my life rewritten, reworked a text so much", speaking of three or four successive versions. This one, via a typescript kept at Yale's Beinecke Library, was translated into English in The Dial in January 1922. The manuscript, written in black ink on large leaves with narrow margins, shows a few erasures and corrections. At the bottom of the last page, Aragon has inscribed a line from Baudelaire: "La froide majesté de la femme stérile C.B." (The cold majesty of the barren woman C.B.). In this tale, Aragon portrays a young woman named Matisse. "For the first time in literature, Matisse is not a Russian princess, but a redhead born in Les Batignolles, more than twenty years ago. Her arms, the longest in the world, end in barely outlined hands, so large that one imagines them made to support a pensive forehead"... And he concludes: "If Matisse weren't so coldly reasonable, she would soon dominate the city like Ninon in the past, and Sorel today. She's content to inhabit it.