Le Nœud de vipères

Name: Le Nœud de vipères
SKU: 29646
Author: François Mauriac

Paris, Grasset, coll. « Pour mon plaisir », (February 23) 1932.

1 vol. (170 x 215 mm) of 311 p., [3] and 1 f. Black morocco decorated with a large disc-shaped mosaic design with an elaborate pattern of gilt and blind fillets, enhanced at the corners and center with cream morocco, spine ribbed and decorated to match, gilt title, doublures with a border of gilt and blind fillets, double endleaves of gray moiré and decorated paper, edges gilt on the rough, original wrappers and spine preserved, chemise and slipcase (binding signed by Pierre Legrain & Jacques Anthoine-Legrain).

First edition. One of 25 réimposé copies on Montval paper, this copy among the 5 hors commerce copies (no. V). They are preceded only by nine copies on Japanese paper.

“Writing is a form of self-exposure,” François Mauriac once confided. Is his work a confession? His own words suggest as much: “I had a passion (…) for the conversations of grown-ups; nothing interested me more than to make myself forgotten in a corner and listen to what was being said; and I have kept a vivid memory of that whole small world (…) in which I lived, and from which a large part of my novelistic work emerged.” In Le Nœud de vipères, the confession is that of Louis: an old man writing a letter to his wife — and his children — filled with resentment. He loathes this “brood of vipers,” a pack united against him, hovering around his fortune. His sole pleasure lies in thwarting the family’s schemes and maneuvering to disinherit them: “And I, witness to this struggle which I alone knew to be useless and vain, felt like a god, ready to crush these frail insects in my powerful hand, to grind these tangled vipers beneath my heel, and I laughed.”

Mauriac was elected to the Académie française the following year and received the Nobel Prize in Literature twenty years later, in 1952.

A rare printing of one of the great novels of the twentieth century, here in a remarkable binding designed by Pierre Legrain and executed by his stepson Jacques Anthoine-Legrain, who used this design — almost certainly an unrealized model by Legrain, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 1929 — for this altogether fitting copy of Le Nœud de vipères.

Jacques Anthoine-Legrain (1907–1970) began as a binder in 1929 and took over from his stepfather, continuing his tradition of linear designs and colored mosaics. By the late 1930s, his bindings had established themselves both for their style and their technical accomplishment.

#29646

Back