Signed presentation inscriptions: “à Ferdinand de Vazeilles, un ancien monégasque qui regrette la Lestra, Marcel Pagnol, 1959”; “à Ferdinand de Vazeilles, très cordial hommage, Marcel Pagnol, 1959.”
Pagnol’s masterpiece of childhood memory, his “journal d’enfance,” here inscribed to another lover of childhood games: Ferdinand de Vazeilles. The first industrialist in France to establish a die-casting foundry business, Vazeilles is best known for what followed: the creation of the Solido miniature car brand, now nearly a century old.
Vazeilles was a regular guest at La Lestra (“the cave” in Monégasque), the three-story mansion on the Boulevard des Moulins that Marcel and Jacqueline Pagnol had acquired in 1947. It was there, tragically, that their young daughter Estelle died suddenly in 1954 of a sudden acetonemic crisis. The couple decided to close the house and never return.
Despite this tragedy, Marcel Pagnol remained loyal to Monaco, entrusting the publication of these childhood memoirs to his longtime friend, the Monégasque publisher Clément Pastorelly.
The wrappers bear a printing statement of 1,000 copies, but the colophons are correct: these copies follow the first 1,000 numbered copies on vélin de Renage.