Le Supplice de Phèdre
One of the copies printed for the press.
Signed presentation inscription: “À Madame Colette, son respectueux et profond admirateur, Henri Deberly.”
A close friend of Jean Cocteau and a familiar figure in the NRF circle, Henri Deberly received the Prix Goncourt for this psychological novel, in which jealousy, passion and cruelty of feeling crystallize. Drawing on the tragic legacy of Racine, Le Supplice de Phèdre transposes the mechanics of an intimate drama into a contemporary setting, confirming the jury’s predilection for writers linked to the Nouvelle Revue Française: after Proust (1919), Fabre (1923) and Sandre (1924), it continued a string of awards that established the NRF as the leading breeding ground of interwar French literature.
The second woman elected to the Académie Goncourt, in 1945, Colette would go on to serve as its president between 1949 and 1954. In 1926, it was in her capacity as an editor (she directed a series at Flammarion) and journalist that Deberly sent her this volume.
From the “Prix Goncourt” library of Gérard Pouguet, with bookplate.