Le Tour du malheur

Kessel’s major work. It covers the period from 1915 to 1930, during which Kessel, gradually leaving behind his anonymous youth as a refugee, became first a journalist, then a successful writer. Through the character of Richard Dalleau, he retraces his own path: from the boy too young to go to the front, discovering the horrors of war in a luxurious Nice hotel converted into a hospital, to the accomplished man pursuing both journalistic and literary careers.

“The title came to me around the age of thirty: I seem to have gone round happiness, and I have gone round my own unhappiness, because I know that I will never, never be at peace with myself,” Kessel declared in 1974. He went on to confirm the chronology: “When Munich happened, one didn’t need to be a prophet, war was coming, and I felt it was truly essential for me to write this book. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to write it — one never knows what might happen during a war. I rented a small house in the Eure. I had written about a book and a half when war broke out […] When I came back, I made film scripts, other reports. I had only one idea, to take up this book again. As soon as I could, I left for another campaign, and there, in a small hotel on the Marne, I looked back over the first two volumes and continued. It took me about a year and a half. By 1948–49 the book was finished. Le Tour du malheur is by far the book I care most about.” (Le Monde, 14 June 1974).

Kessel had already expressed this sentiment eight years earlier, in a letter to a journalist in March 1966: “Since you wish to know the titles of the books I consider most significant among those I have written, here they are: L’Équipage, Les Captifs, Belle de Jour, Fortune Carrée, Le Tour du Malheur and Le Lion. But Le Tour du Malheur is the one I prefer, only the flaw of this novel is that it has four volumes…”

This letter now accompanies Kessel’s own nominative copy (Alde, June 2023, no. 204). A narrative that took Kessel twenty years to mature and ten to write.

“Before setting sail with Druon for London, Kessel buried in a garden on the Côte d’Azur, near the house where he had lived in the preceding months, the manuscript of the first two volumes of Le Tour du malheur. They lay at the bottom of a disused well in Agay, a seaside resort at the foot of the Estérel. The third volume, then in progress, he carried with him in his precious leather case. He had found its title one recent day of sun and joy: Les Lauriers roses.” (Bona, Les Partisans).

Kessel did not return to the spot until 1946. The miracle occurred: the manuscripts were still there, intact. He took up his texts again, determined this time to complete the saga. Back in Paris, leading a bohemian life, he sought isolation by moving to the Paris region. He spent a year at Mary-sur-Marne, staying in the small hotel overlooking the village square, in the shadow of the imposing Château Marysien, a vast eighteenth-century residence, where Kessel occupied room no. 3. Once the fourth volume was finished, he could return to Paris and the Rue Quentin-Bauchart. The corrections took more than a year, interrupted once more by reporting assignments. Finally, at the end of 1948, he was able to hand Gaston Gallimard the book he cared for most, “the secret, beating heart of his life” (Bona, op. cit.).

A very fine copy.
Of the utmost rarity in such condition, in wrappers.