La Vie amoureuse de Francois Barbazanges

A regular guest at Madame Arman de Caillavet’s literary salon, Marcelle Tinayre was among the co-founders of the Prix Vie heureuse, the future Prix Femina. Her novels enjoyed enormous popular success: La Maison du péché went through more than forty editions and was praised by Joyce, who noted that “despite the piety and innocence with which [Marcelle Tinayre] clothes the slightest variations of feeling and the most diverse manifestations of human nature, one senses in the author’s mind the constant presence of the terrible image of the Jansenist Christ, hovering like a spectre of sadness and desolation over the whole tragedy.”

The following year she published La Vie amoureuse de François Barbazanges, another parodic novel, set near Tulle in the eighteenth century: Margot, a young lacemaker nicknamed “la Chabrette,” falls in love with the handsome François Barbazanges, a gallant poet and lute player who remains cold and unattainable. Tinayre satirizes the minor nobility and the new bourgeoisie, caught up in imitating Parisian fashions and the salon of the précieuses, among whom the old scholar Baluze, Colbert’s librarian, launches the famous “Poinct de Tulle” lace.

Nominated for the Légion d’Honneur in 1908, she refused it, provoking a heated controversy. Derisively nicknamed “la Limousine,” she was the target of misogynistic and Left Bank literary attacks, notably from Guillaume Apollinaire.

A very fine copy, finely bound.