La Clef des champs

Eugène Labiche entered literary life in 1836, joining two university friends, Auguste Lefranc and Marc-Michel, to write plays: they humorously called their venture “L’Usine dramatique” (the dramatic factory). Their first play, published under the collective pseudonym Paul Dandré, was La Cuvette d’eau. The following year, they achieved their first success with Monsieur de Coislin. Other comedies followed, mainly the vaudevilles and farces then fashionable. Labiche would later include none of these in his Théâtre complet.

La Clef des champs appeared during this period, in 1839, and stands as an almost autobiographical account of the life of a young bourgeois dilettante who loved writing for the theater but had no real need to earn his living from it. Alone or with his associates, Labiche would go on, from 1848, to produce an average of ten plays a year, becoming the leading vaudevillist of the 1840s–1860s, with enormous successes such as Embrassons-nous, Folleville! (1850), Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (1851) and Le Voyage de Monsieur Perrichon (1860).

A fine copy — rare without an edition statement. It has been washed and expertly rebound by Maylander.

From the libraries of Laurent Meeûs (trace of a bookplate on the front endleaf) and Jacques Crépineau (bookplate).

Spine uniformly faded.