Citadelle
One of 60 copies on vergé de hollande paper (no. XVI), after 13 copies on Imperial Japan paper.
The manuscript of Citadelle, from its earliest drafts in 1936, never left Saint-Exupéry’s side, traveling with him from France to Portugal, through Morocco, Algeria and Italy, to the United States, where he would joke: “I will never finish it… It is my posthumous work!”
Gathered in a suitcase, these pages, written over several years, form a collection of reflections on the human condition and its relationship to God, which he continued to enrich alongside the last books published in his lifetime: Terre des hommes, Pilote de guerre and Le Petit Prince.
The manuscript, published in 1948, is structured in 219 chapters, in a text established for the first edition by Nelly [Hélène] de Vogüé, Léon Wencelius (a captain of the Free French Forces) and Simone de Saint-Exupéry, the author’s sister, in an order that may not be the one the author would have chosen had he been able to complete his work.
Citadelle, a “lyric chant of biblical inspiration” according to Nelly de Vogüé, brings together the major themes of Saint-Exupéry’s humanist and spiritual message: “To give meaning to man.”
A fine copy.
From the library of Marcel de Merre (bookplate; Paris, Sotheby’s, 2007).