De Goupil à Margot

Name: De Goupil à Margot
SKU: 28384
Author: Louis Pergaud

Paris, Mercure de France, (August 30) 1910.

1 vol. (125 x 185 mm) of 258 p. and [1] f. Half brown morocco, spine ribbed and decorated, gilt title, date gilt at foot, top edge gilt, original wrappers and spine preserved (binding signed Franz).

First edition, first printing (no deluxe-paper copies were issued). Copy numbered from the first thousand (no. 527).

Prix Goncourt, 1910. This collection of animal tales established Louis Pergaud, a schoolteacher from the Franche-Comté, as one of the great writers of nature. In the tradition of Jules Renard’s Histoires naturelles or Kipling’s novels, Pergaud describes with sensitive precision the fates of rural wildlife, lending them emotions and conflicts that are almost human.

Beyond the 5,000 francs of the Prix Goncourt — a considerable sum for this provincial newly settled in the capital — the Goncourt crown was a striking recognition for the twenty-eight-year-old writer, who followed it the next year with La Guerre des boutons.

Killed at the front in 1915, Louis Pergaud was reported missing at Marchéville. This tragic fate lent a particular aura to his brief body of work, marked by the tenderness and cruelty of the animal and rural world.

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