L'ami des filles... ou Chas-Laborde

On 26 May 1958 around half past eight in the evening, the voice of the famous French actor André Luguet was heard in a cultural programme on French television. He read a poem out loud from an old postcard:

De Bayonne ou je vous écris

Cher Tristan Derème

Combien je regrette Paris.

Around the same time, the poem's author Francis Carco passed away at 18Quai de Béthune on the Ile Saint Louis. Carco was born François Carcopino, and his reputation was that of a passionate poet and novelist, an objective observer (but not without feeling) of street life, of whole and partial criminals, drunkards, prostitutes and pimps of Montmartre.

Francis Carco was a man of very many talents: besides poetry and novels, he also wrote essays, reportage, art books, memoirs and chansons. He knew everyone who was anybody in the French world of artists and writers in his day: Colette, Modigliani, Katherine Mansfield, Picasso, Apollinaire, and many others. He led a life that was at least as exciting and varied as his novels, which served the authenticity of his work extremely well. After his novel Rien qu'une femme (1921), Carco always wrote in the first person; saying: 'My sense of identification with the narrator is complete.'

Family of crazies

François Carcopino was born in 1886 in Nouméa on New Caledonia, a French penal colony in the Pacific Ocean, where his father worked as a guard. His family was of Corsican descent; it was described by Carco as a family of crazies. This certainly applied to the violent nature of his father, from whom he took many a beating as a child. Carco's biographers use this to explain his rebelliousness and unconventionality, his melancholy and his pessimistic view of life.

Carco had been writing poetry since puberty, publishing them in a number of provincial magazines at the beginning of the twentieth century. After the publication of his bestseller Jésus la Caille (1914), a book about a homosexual pimp in the Montmartre underworld, he also developed into a celebrated novelist. In 1920, an edition of Jésus la Caille was published featuring three illustrations by Chas Laborde.

L'ami des filles... ou Chas-Laborde, published in 1921, a book with drawings by Chas Laborde and a text by Carco that was part poetic evocation and part art criticism. The copy in the Koopman Collection contains an extra set of the illustrations in colour. The book was published in a deluxe edition by Ronald Davis et Cie, then a bookstore in the Rue de Courcelles on the Rive Droite in Paris, which was able to publish this kind of bibliophile edition regularly thanks to a group of loyal customers. Both the text and the illustrations, drawn in thick lines, reflect the atmosphere of prostitution: a young woman under the sheets with a customer on the edge of the bed; a madam behind the desk of a brothel; two nude girls in a bedstead.