Les Bêtes suivi de Le Temps des Morts
One of 11 hors commerce deluxe copies on vergé de Hollande, this one nominative for Colette (A).
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Madame Colette, en témoignage d'admiration et de respect, Pierre Gascar.”
Goncourt Prize, 1953. Pierre Gascar (1916–1997) won the prize for Les Bêtes, not a novel but a collection of six stories, all centered on the relationship between man and animal. Far from fables, these are harsh texts, drawn from his experience of war and captivity, in which close contact with horses, rats or dogs reveals instincts of survival, fraternity and brutality alike. Published the same year, Le Temps des morts extends this exploration, focusing on the presence of corpses and the process of decomposition. The two works form two sides of the same inquiry into the human condition.
Both writers now appear as precursors of an ecological sensibility: Colette through her celebration of the plant and animal worlds, Gascar through his exploration of the boundaries between humanity and nature, a concern he would carry into his environmental writings of the 1970s.
For the customary post-Goncourt printing reserved for the author and members of the Académie Goncourt, Gallimard combined Gascar’s two collections into a single volume, issued in an extremely confidential collective edition, alongside a commercial edition and one bound in Bonet boards.
This exceptional copy, the first, lettered A, was presented to Colette, then president of the Académie Goncourt. Throughout her work, Colette had celebrated the closeness between animals and humans, and an intimacy with gardens, plants and domestic creatures. Gascar, in his own way, extends this vision, making this copy a particularly moving association.