Suora scolastica
One of 30 copies on Japanese paper with the suite of woodcuts signed by the artist, numbered and enriched with a presentation inscription from the publisher to Édouard Champion.
It is exceptionally enriched with an additional suite on China paper.
This unfinished “Italian chronicle” draws on the story of Benedetta Carlini, a seventeenth-century Italian mystic and nun. It was, by accident, Stendhal’s testamentary work: the last text he was working on when death struck him unexpectedly on a Paris sidewalk on 22 March 1842. The text was recovered by the great Stendhal scholar Henry Debraye in 1920, established from various working notes and the two manuscripts held at the Bibliothèque municipale de Grenoble. Stendhal had made a first attempt at the text in April 1839, immediately after completing L’Abbesse de Castro and La Chartreuse de Parme. A further version was dictated to a copyist and corrected in March 1842, for final revisions.
Bourdenet, “Topo-esthétique de Suora Scolastica,” Revue Stendhal [online], 2024; Berthier, Stendhal, O.C., III, pp. 1107–1171.