'L'ART DE MAL ECRIRE'

COLETTE (SIDONIE GABRIELLE CLAUDINE, 1873-1954, French writer) AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT SIGNED ('Colette'), a tender, wry tribute in French to her collaborator as a playwright, Léopold Marchand ('My child Léo' of her letters): 'Is he a martyr, is he a sadist? He had...the brightest future as a dramatic author...He came close to compromising such an abundance of certain riches...My maturity, inexperienced in matters of the theatre was met with his youthful experience; his patience clashed with my now vagabond, now grumpy moods...the scenes he wrote, reverently, in fine language, I replaced with the seemingly unpremeditated, rapid dialogue that trips off the tongue, the banal and lively language that we speak in our daily lives...my benevolent martyr with...the pink cheeks of a giant baby, his blond curly hair, and the short-sightedness of a vaguely Scandinavian philosopher, with the precocious wisdom of a young elephant, my victim will have learned from me just one thing, but one that counts: the art of writing badly...', 3 pages, quarto, on light blue paper, with autograph revisions, last leaf deliberately cut across to remove signature possibly by the printing house and replaced with tape, no place, no date

Léopold Marchand and Colette collaborated in adapting her novels Chéri, La Vagabonde and La Seconde for the stage. He became a firm friend. To protect him his wife Misz, a Polish Jew, killed herself in 1942 rather than have him seized for having a Jewish wife.

£850