Sésame et les Lys [Sesame and Lilies]
Paris, Mercure de France, (May 12) 1906.
1 vol. (135 x 190 mm) of 224 p., [1] and 1 f. Taupe half-maroquin with corners, gilt fillets on covers, ribbed spine with framed boxes, gilt head, date at foot, covers and spine preserved (binding signed by [Jean] Duval).
First edition of the French translation.
Translation by Marcel Proust, with a long preface: “Sur la lecture”.
One of the first 12 copies on hollande (no. 9).
We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.
Marcel Proust began to take an interest in Ruskin’s works in the autumn of 1899, when he immersed himself in reading what he called ‘this great man’, after discovering the chapter entitled ‘The Lamp of Memory’ in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. It was a revelation.
A few months later, on learning of the art critic’s death, he immediately wrote to Marie Nordlinger, an English friend and cousin of Reynaldo Hahn, expressing not only his sadness but also his desire for the writer’s works to live on: he then prepared several tributes to Ruskin in the form of obituary articles and notes that would become, with amplified modifications, the peritexts of his future translation of the Amiens Bible. It was an arduous task, since Proust barely knew English: it was Madame Proust mère who did the ‘word for word’, thus making a vital contribution to the translation of the Amiens Bible. Ill, she was replaced by Marie Nordlinger, Reynaldo Hahn’s cousin, in this role of pioneer when Proust tackled Sésame et les Lys, aided by Robert d’Humières, Kipling’s translator at the Mercure de France. After his mother’s death, Proust resumed the trials and tribulations of his bereavement, writing to Marie Nordlinger: ‘I have closed for ever the era of translations that Maman favoured’. By his own admission, he wanted to devote himself to his personal work, and with this in mind decided to preface his translation with a preface that was so important, a delightful text entitled ‘On Reading’: ‘There are perhaps no days of our childhood that we have lived so fully as those we thought we were leaving without living them, those we spent with a favourite book. All I have tried to do in this preface is to reflect on the same subject as Ruskin: the usefulness of reading. Ruskin gave his lecture the symbolic title of Sesame, the magic word that opens the door to the thieves’ cave being the allegory of reading, which opens the door to those treasures where the most precious wisdom of men is locked up: books. These 52 pages were later reworked and published in Pastiches et Mélangesunder the title ‘Journée de lecture’.
This important text first appeared in La Renaissance latine, 15 June 1905. Proust wrote to Hélène de Caraman-Chimay: ‘You don’t know what tricks I intended to use to try and get you to read a few lines of this article, and I must have been deliriously happy that you yourself read it and liked it […]. These pages will serve as a preface to Sésame et les Lys, a translation I am about to publish, consisting of two lectures, the ‘Trésors des Rois’ (‘Treasures of Kings’) dedicated to Reynaldo and the ‘Jardins des Reines’ (‘Gardens of Queens’) dedicated to Melle Lemaire. If it would not seem too unworthy of you, I would dedicate this preface to you’. (Correspondance, V, 240). The Princess accepted.
A precious copy on hollande; that of Jeanne Jacquemin. A self-taught painter, she set the critics alight at her first exhibition in 1892 and astonished them with her androgynous and sensual physique: tall and slender, the young redheaded woman ‘with pre-raphaelic eyes’ was the perfect embodiment of Symbolism. A member of the Rosicrucian society, she was admired by Huysmans, Verlaine and Odilon Redon, and struck up a relationship of friendship and mutual admiration with Stéphane Mallarmé. The ‘green-eyed painter’, as he called her, was often mentioned in Edmond de Goncourt’s diary; she produced several lithographs for L’Estampe moderne and illustrated La Mandragore, a ‘Christmas Tale’ by Jean Lorrain published in 1894.
Depressed, she was treated by Dr Samuel Pozzi, the father of French gynaecology, who knew the ‘Tout Paris’ like the back of his hand. The lover of Sarah Bernard, nicknamed ‘Docteur Dieu’, he was a friend of the Proust family, not only of her father, Pr. Adrien Proust, a renowned epidemiologist, but also of his sons Robert – who was his pupil at Broca Hospital – and Marcel, to whom he granted a dispensation in 1914 to avoid being sent to the front. He encouraged the development of radiotherapy, mainly at the Hôpital Tenon, where the Oncology-Radiotherapy department now bears his name. He treated Jeanne Jacquemin for many years, and after the First World War she met a certain Yvon Leloup (1871-1926), a writer known as Paul Sédir (an anagram of Désir, chosen under the influence of L’Homme de Désir by Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, an 18th-century illuminist philosopher). This mystic, who spent several years studying the library of Stanislas de Guaita, undoubtedly introduced him to bibliophily. He was a friend of the French occultist Gérard Encausse, known as Papus (1865-1916) and an ardent supporter of his movement, which he left only because of the poor health of his future wife, whom he married in 1921.
The copy then passed through the hands of bookseller Ronald Davis – it was probably he who had the binding made, just as he had a whole collection of Proust’s works made up at these dates in the late 1920s and 1930s (Christie’s, London, 2007, lot no. 133), including a Swann and this volume on hollande.
The only other known copies on hollande paper are the following: Léon Blum (kept at the BnF); no. 2 (Maylander binding, Simonson-Hayoit-Leroy collections, 2007, no. 75) and no. 8 (R. and B. Loliée collection, no. 146). None of the twelve appeared in the 1971 exhibition Proust et son temps.
From the library of Jeanne Jacquemin (bookplate).
