L’Araigne
One of 27 copies on pur fil paper (no. 1).
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour monsieur Hubert Person qui possède les ‘grands papiers’ de tous les prix Goncourt, - en souvenir du prix Goncourt 1938. Henri Troyat.”
Mounted at front: an image of Henri Troyat's wedding to Lise Muller, taken from the newspaper Écho de Paris of January 31, 1939.
At only twenty-seven, Henri Troyat (Lev Aslanovitch Tarassov, 1911–2007) achieved sudden literary fame with this psychological novel, which portrays Gérard Fonsèque, a young man pathologically attached to his sisters, sinking into madness as they gain independence. L’Araigne explores the tyranny of family bonds, the vertigo of emotional dependency and the mind’s distortions under the grip of obsession.
On 7 December 1938, after five rounds of voting, the novel was awarded the prize by five votes to five over Brune by François de Roux, the deciding double vote of the president, J.-H. Rosny aîné, tipping the balance in Troyat’s favor. This recognition also marked a turning point for Plon, a house less often represented among prizewinners than Gallimard, Grasset or Albin Michel: it had won the prize only once before, in 1907. For the author, it launched an exceptional career, crowned in 1959 by his election to the Académie française and by an immense body of novels and biographies.
From the “Goncourt” libraries of Hubert Person and Gérard Pouguet, with bookplates.