Belle du seigneur
One of 55 copies on vélin pur fil (no. 49) — the only deluxe paper.
Belle du Seigneur, widely regarded as the most striking anti-love novel in twentieth-century French literature, is a merciless indictment of romantic passion: the protagonists, Solal and Ariane, are suffocated by the perfect passion they have imagined and whose roles they play out.
The novel breaks a fourteen-year silence (Le Livre de ma mère appeared in 1954) to return to Solal and Mangeclous, transforming the ironic momentum of these two works, published in 1930 and 1938, into a tragedy of love that brings the diasporic and family saga to its close. Belle du Seigneur stands at its center: “What a piece, what a monster! 845 pages, 32 francs, and about as many hours of reading: one is terrified… Yet one attempts the adventure. One plunges into the enormous story: the mechanism takes hold and one is trapped. Dazzling beauties, torrents of bad taste: one is swept away by the one, dazzled by the other. One emerges from it rather stunned, mind empty, but let us be honest: the game was worth the candle.” (François Nourissier, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, September 1968).
A very fine copy, as issued, entirely unopened.