Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Madeleine Marignac qui apporte la gentillesse et la diligence de [Tistou les pouces verts] aux tâches, parfois ingrates, de la vie littéraire, amicalement, Druon, Oct. 57.”
Maurice Druon’s only children’s tale, Tistou les pouces verts became one of the great pacifist — and even proto-ecological — texts of French children’s literature. It went through numerous reprintings, and it is safe to say that every French primary school owned at least one copy, at least during the last century.
Illustrated with the fresh, luminous vignettes of Jacqueline Duhême, the book tells of Tistou’s discovery of his “green thumbs,” a discreet and beneficent power that makes flowers bloom in prisons, hospitals and cannons, opposing the healing force of beauty and nature to the systematizing spirit of adults. Beneath the apparent simplicity of a coming-of-age story — Tistou “does not like school” and receives his lesson from the gardener Monsieur Moustache — Druon develops a gentle but resolute critique of militarism and ideology, reasserting the sovereignty of childhood.
A delicate provenance: this copy is inscribed to Madeleine Marignac, whose “kindness and diligence” Druon acknowledges. She was likely among the earliest readers of the work and its proofreader. At this date she was merely his secretary and proofreader, typing his manuscripts with remarkable orthographic and syntactic rigor. Present at every stage of the writing of Les Rois maudits, she became a discreet but constant collaborator and, over the years, his confidante, then his companion, supplanting Edmonde Charles-Roux in Druon’s heart. The relationship became official in 1967, when he was elected to the Académie française, and the couple married the following year.
A very fine copy of the original Del Duca printing, in publisher’s boards.