Sésame et les Lys. Des Trésors des Rois, des Jardins des Reines. Traduction, notes et préface de Marcel Proust

A man of letters and a socialite, Léon Belugou was a close friend of Proust, regularly staying with him in Deauville and Trouville. Several letters exchanged between the two men mention Ruskin’s work. Belugou also served as tutor and trusted advisor to great families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and contributed to La Revue blanche and the Mercure de France. He attended Théodule Ribot’s lectures at the Collège de France and was a member of the Stendhal Club alongside Barrès, Bourget and Signac, where he gave several lectures, notably on Nietzsche and Remy de Gourmont.

Marcel Proust began taking an interest in Ruskin’s work in autumn 1899, upon his return from Évian-les-Bains, immersing himself in the reading of the man he called “this great man” after discovering the chapter entitled “The Lamp of Memory” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. This second translation, three years after that of La Bible d’Amiens, is dedicated to Reynaldo Hahn and includes the famous preface, “Sur la lecture,” a text of considerable importance: “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left unlived, those we spent with a favorite book. In this preface, I have only tried, in my turn, to reflect on the same subject Ruskin had treated: the usefulness of reading. Ruskin gave his lecture the symbolic title Sésame, the magic word that opens the door of the thieves’ cave being an allegory for reading, which opens for us the door to those treasures in which the most precious wisdom of mankind is enclosed: books.” Ruskin’s (1819–1900) two lectures, gathered under the title Sesame and Lilies, had been published in 1865.

Complete with the publisher’s catalogue (8 p.) on salmon paper at the end.
Fragile paper as usual, with two corner losses to the wrapper and the first leaf.