La Ville de la chance
One of the first 10 copies on vélin neige (no. 2), the only issue.
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Monsieur Jean Bardet avec sympathie et amitié, Elie Wiesel, Paris, le 18 avril 1963.”
In 1962, Elie Wiesel was still a young writer, but already an essential voice. A survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he had found in writing not merely an extension of memory but a form of moral necessity. After La Nuit, which remains the founding work of concentration-camp testimony, his oeuvre expanded into a more inward form of witness, in which lived experience continually nourished fiction, reflection and spiritual questioning, in constant tension between fidelity to the dead and the difficulty of continuing to speak in the name of the living.
La Ville de la chance belongs to this period of full literary assertion, one that Jean Bardet, co-founder with Paul Flamand of Éditions du Seuil, never ceased to support.
A very fine copy of remarkable provenance.