La voix du R.P.: "Eh petiots, nous sommes à la veille du grand jour. Faites votre contrition et prenez le couteau de la suprême vicissitude, de la prudence, du zèle et de la charité."

The present lot is one of 80 collages executed by Ernst for his 1930 collage-novel Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, consisting purely of collaged illustrations and their captions. In 1919, Ernst began experimenting with this collage technique, involving cutting and pasting from reproductions of 19th century engravings to create a dream-like subversion of traditional illustration. He first published his collages in this style to accompany Paul Eluard's 1922 Repetitions, but it was not until 1929 that he published the first of the three "collage-novels," La femme 100 têtes. The second of these novels, Rêve d'une petite fille qui voulut entrer au Carmel, was published by Editions du Carrefour, Paris.