Le Salon de Wurtemberg
One of 35 deluxe copies on vélin pur chiffon de Rives (no. 24).
Signed presentation inscription: “à Henri Claibrat (?), cette solitude, ce lecteur infatigable, dans la passion de la musique et des livres, Pascal Quignard.”
By the time Le Salon du Wurtemberg appeared, Pascal Quignard had already built a singular body of work, blending narrative and essay, but it was with this book that he crossed a decisive threshold. The novel follows a musician who has withdrawn to the family estate of Bergheim, in Württemberg, and looks back on his childhood and adult life, in a weave of languages, landscapes and figures — cats, children, old ladies of faded refinement — composing a memory shot through with nostalgia and muted violence.
The book already carries the seed of one of the author’s great successes, Tous les matins du monde (1991): the evocation of Saint-Colombe and Marin Marais already appears here. Music, lineage and the shadow of the seventeenth century thus pervade the text with the resonance of the book — and film — still to come.
A fine copy.