Le Salon de Wurtemberg
One of 35 copies on vélin de Rives (no. 20).
Signed presentation inscription: “Pour Arlette et Maurice Alteirac, avec toute ma sympathie, à Paris, le samedi 17 janvier 1987, Pascal Quignard.”
When 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 of recognition. The novel, expansive and meditative, follows a musician who has retired to the family estate of Bergheim, in Württemberg, and looks back on his childhood and adult life, weaving together languages, landscapes and figures — cats, children, old ladies of faded refinement — into a memory shot through with nostalgia and muted violence.
The book already contains the seeds of one of the author’s great successes, Tous les matins du monde (1991): the evocation of Saint-Colombe and Marin Marais appears here already, as a still-veiled sketch. Music, lineage and the shadow of the seventeenth century thus pervade the text with the resonance of the book — and film — to come.
A copy in perfect condition, with a strictly contemporary inscription and a slipcase with a repeated decoration by Julie Nadot. Publisher’s band preserved.