Le Livre de la jungle
Copy of the 1915 reissue (wrappers and title page), but with the correct achevé d'imprimer leaf from the first edition (1907).
Maurice Genevoix's own copy, with his manuscript ownership inscription — purchased in Orléans at the bookshop R. Houzé (label on the inside front wrapper).
Even more than Jack London, two books were fundamental in shaping the young Maurice Genevoix: L’Enfant des bois by Élie Berthet, which first opened him to reverie, and then Kipling’s Le Livre de la jungle (The Jungle Book). In Trente mille jours (pp. 161–163), Genevoix devoted two remarkable pages to it. Among the few books he piously took with him to the École Normale Supérieure was this very copy, already read during his boarding-school years in Orléans.
“For the first time, I saw myself given a number: 4. One might think of military life, if one had not also known, in the early years of this century, the life of a boarding pupil at a French provincial lycée. Everything the word ‘barracks’ evokes, I knew it there, at age ten, at the Lycée Pothier, rue Jeanne d’Arc […] [I had] for consolation the keen taste for camaraderie and the prodigious treasure that is reading,” which opened another world to him. Jules Verne bored him; he grew enthusiastic over Hector Malot’s Sans famille, before immersing himself in London and Kipling. (Maurice Genevoix, Chemins de mémoire).
He kept this copy carefully in his adult library ever after and returned to it often in his own work; years later, he devoted a long talk to it on the RTF program “Les Grandes conférences,” in September 1953.
From the library of Maurice Genevoix (bookplate).