Les Chemins de la liberté

This is the smallest deluxe issue of the author’s work: La Nausée had 23 copies on pur fil; Le Mur, 30 on the same paper; and Les Mots, 15 on Japanese paper. This edition of only eight copies is thus very rare, all the more so since the final volume, La Mort dans l’âme, appeared four years after the first two: a complete set, bearing the same copy number throughout, is therefore of exceptional rarity.

A precious copy, one of only three hors commerce copies, bound by Pierre-Lucien Martin.

In March 1940, the manuscript of L’Âge de raison, the first volume of Les Chemins de la liberté, was typed by Hélène, known as “Poupette,” the sister of Simone de Beauvoir. It was published five years later together with Le Sursis. The third volume, La Mort dans l’âme, appeared four years after that. The fourth installment Sartre intended to add to the series, to be titled Dernière Chance, never materialized. A few passages survive in manuscript form under the title Drôle d’amitié.

“Les Chemins de la liberté is hardly read anymore,” notes Philippe Lançon: “too long, too talkative, too didactic. This is a mistake, at least for the first of the three volumes, the one in which Sartre’s troubled and closed music remains most audible, most powerful, least subordinate to that of a few great others, Dos Passos or Hemingway. La Nausée, Le Mur, L’Âge de raison: Sartre is a better novelist when nothing happens, when his characters wander and struggle in the yellowish froth of their crises, almost without acting, as if in old, dirty, horsehair clothes, too tight for them. As soon as they take action, they take on the air of demonstrations, of devices, almost of samples. Not everyone can be American.” (Libération, 3 August 2014).