Les Faux-monnayeurs

The Counterfeiters is “the novel watching itself being written” (Sarraute), but it is also the novel in crisis: to better undermine the foundations of the traditional novel, Gide set out, three years after the end of the Great War, to write the novel of novels, one that would contain the entire history of the genre. The credo is summed up in the famous statement given to Édouard — the character who wants to write, within the novel, a book called Les Faux-monnayeurs: “Throughout my life, at the slightest shock, I would like to ring true, honest, authentic. Almost everyone I have known rings false. To be worth exactly what one appears to be worth; not to try to appear worth more than one is… People want to deceive, and become so preoccupied with appearances that they end up no longer knowing who they are…”

One of the marvels of twentieth-century French literature, Les Faux-monnayeurs is formally built around the device of mise en abyme. The term, in this particular spelling, was coined by Gide, who first used it in 1893 before giving an early sketch of the device in Paludes in 1895. What might be described as theater within theater (as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Truffaut’s Day for Night) becomes here the novel within the novel, through which Gide revolutionized the rules of the genre.

His Journal records that he began writing in October 1921: “I write, almost without difficulty, two pages of the dialogue with which I think of opening my novel. But I will only be satisfied if I manage to move even further away from realism. What matters is that I accustom myself to living with my characters.” He finished it three and a half years later: “8 June 1925. Finished Les Faux-Monnayeurs.”

This copy is sumptuously bound by Charles Vermuyse in October, and gilt by André Jeanne in February 1943, after a delicate design conceived by Paul Bonet. Recorded in the Carnets under reference 598, this is the fifth binding Paul Bonet executed for Les Faux-monnayeurs on the réimposé issue. He would go on to produce three more bindings for this title afterward. His own comment on it: “Perhaps too much elegant fantasy for this work.”

This binding is the fifth of eight that Paul Bonet signed for this title by Gide. The design, executed by Jeanne, was first created in 1942 on a green morocco with doublures, bound by Cretté (a binding exhibited at the Salon des arts décoratifs). In 1943, Bonet had it reproduced twice, once on green morocco (this copy) and once on garnet morocco, using the same small tools as the earlier binding, again gilt by Jeanne, while both of these later bindings were executed by Vermuyse.