Sulfures & Presse-Papiers II (Detail)

AKA >> Sulphur and Paperweights II

H Carre > Fall-Winter 2002

Poor Claude Le Petit, the poet, who composed a libertine ode and whom a gust of wind contrived to have burnt alive in 1662, after having his right hand chopped off! His manuscript sheets had blown out of his open window and landed at the house of the King’s Attorney General. Hence the usefulness of paperweights to keep manuscripts on tables. And when these objects bestow the full-coloured magic of “sulphur”, what poetic justice!