IONESCO, Eugéne. Le Roi se meurt.

[Paris]: Gallimard, 1963.

8vo. (179×115 mm.). Inscribed by Ionesco in blue ink on half-title, ‘Marthe’ in blue ink in a different hand in blank portion of upper cover, a few short underlinings in blue ink to text. Publisher’s paper wrappers printed in red and black, lightly browned and creased at spine, a few light stains and creases to covers. A very good association copy.

Service de presse copy, with a nice inscription from Ionesco to the Romanian authoress Princess Marie Bibesco. Ionesco (1909-94) was a Romanian-born French playwright, a leading figure in the ‘theater of the absurd’. His earliest play, ‘La cantatrice chauve’ (’the bald primadonna) was first presented in 1950 and championed by such fellow writers as Jean Anouilh and Raymond Queneau. It was not an immediate success, but is today critically acknowledged and much-studied. It also runs on permanent review at the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris. Ionesco’s plays revolve around the themes of isolation, loneliness, the awareness of death, and the absurdity of everyday life. He also underlines that language is a flawed medium of communication, and in playing with the meanings of words, Ionesco often highlights his characters’ isolation from one another.
In this play, a recurring character in a number of his plays, Bérenger, is presented as the everyman in the position of a King (King Bérenger I), struggling to come to terms with his mortality:
“I told myself that one could learn to die, that I could learn to die, that one can also help other people to die. This seems to me to be the most important thing we can do, since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die. This play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying”. (Ionesco in C. Bonnefoy: Conversations with Eugene Ionesco, p.79).
Marthe Bibesco (1886-1973) was also a Romanian authoress, married to Prince George III Valentin Bibescu, but exiled (via Austria) to Paris after World War One. She wrote, and held literary salons: among her acquaintances were Cocteau, Valéry, Rilke, and St Exupéry (author of the Little Prince). She was also well-connected politically, and had met Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Göring. Her books include ‘Isvor, Pays des saules’ about her native Romania, ‘Le Perroquet Vert’ and ‘Au Bal avec Marcel Proust’. Her name is here written on the cover in blue ink, and there are occasional underlinings in the text in a similar ink; presumably, both are in her hand. A nice association.

Bon exemplaire (service de presse) d’association, portant un bel envoi de l’auteur á la Princesse Marthe Bibesco, écrivaine Roumano-Française, amie de Cocteau, Valéry et St Exupéry, auteur du ‘Perroquet Vert’ et ‘Au Bal avec Marcel Proust’.