La Mort d’une mère
One of 30 deluxe copies on Lana rag paper, this copy hors commerce (no. III).
Signed presentation inscription: “pour Monsieur Armand Flammarion, en cordial hommage, Peyrefitte.”
Following his early works, all published by Jean Vigneau in Marseille, Peyrefitte joined Flammarion in 1949: La Mort d’une mère was the first novel he published there. He remained loyal to this publisher until 1976.
Roger Peyrefitte is remembered above all for Les Amitiés particulières, the controversial winner of the Prix Renaudot in 1945. A former pupil of the Jesuits, born in Castres in 1907, he graduated at the top of the diplomatic section of the École libre des sciences politiques. Entering the Quai d’Orsay in 1931, he became its youngest and most decorated diplomat before being dismissed — an episode he later described in Les Ambassades (1951), a satire of the diplomatic career that provoked heated official statements from the Quai d’Orsay, which only added to the book’s success.