Jean COCTEAU. Autograph manuscript signed,... - Lot 94 - Ader

Jean COCTEAU. Autograph manuscript signed, Paris cœur à cœur, 1962; 1 large page in-fol. Preface to Opération cœur de Paris, a work designed and produced by the Havas Agency, 1962, at the request of Christian Bricard, Chairman and CEO of La Belle Jardinière. The manuscript contains a few erasures and corrections. "Paris is an ogre. Every year, like the Minotaur, it demands its ration of fresh flesh: young stars that it digests hastily in order to devour new ones. But if some mysterious sign or Ariadne's thread protects one of his victims, he spares him, respects him, and gives him, following the example of Theseus, the glory of defeating him. Paris is a big city made up of small towns and villages that even Parisians don't know and that foreigners know better than we do. It was a foreigner who drove me to my own city when I was shooting my film Orpheus and I had to invent an unknown city [...] I have often said that I could not live in Paris, that it was a place of cruel disorder, a car garage, a breeding ground for germs. And each time I came back with love ...