Le Nain jaune

Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française.

His son, Alexandre Jardin, wrote of this book: “I have just read Le Nain Jaune from beginning to end for the first time: since my father’s death, I had never been able to. This book, this miraculous Nain Jaune, I kept it for myself like a good bottle left to age in a cool place, to be drunk on some great occasion, to celebrate a reunion. I emerge from it groggy. I tremble, as though his thirst for a father were now torturing me in turn. Why is it that we only manage to speak of love to each other across the grave? There is no doubt some modesty in that; but I see in it above all an immense disability. Yet are not great books always wooden legs?”

In 1998 Pierre Assouline devoted an important and gripping biography to the man who “was all his life a man of the shadows, until the day his son Pascal Jardin devoted a book to him. The Nain jaune was him, Jean Jardin, adviser to the ‘prince’ and éminence grise, one of the most enigmatic figures ever produced by real power, the kind that is never seen. He had never wanted to write his memoirs, despite numerous requests, fearing he would say too much or too little. The place of the father, the place of women, a self-taught education, a taste for provocation, fashionable Parisian society, a popular streak, literary ambition, nostalgia for the past, an appetite for modernity: the secret life of a man of extraordinary influence.”

A fine copy, as issued.
The rarest and most sought-after of Pascal Jardin’s books.