Les Chevaux du soleil
Paris, Grasset, 1967-1969.
4 vols. (140 x 220 mm), 452, 461, 405 and 390 pp. Bronze morocco with a frame border, gilt title, date gilt at foot, decorated paper on covers, original wrappers and spines preserved (binding signed Devauchelle).
First edition.
One of 100 copies on vélin pur fil (no. 98).
Enriched with an interesting signed typescript letter, addressed to Madame Pirkko-Liisa Stähl and dated September 8, 1977. She had sent Jules Roy, along with a number of other writers, a questionnaire about the Nobel Prize in Literature. Jules Roy's reply reveals his literary admirations: the “ideal type of Nobel laureate in literature: Romain Rolland, Roger Martin du Gard, André Gide, Albert Camus [...] Among the deceased writers who would have deserved the Prize [...] Georges Bernanos. Malraux deserved it too but did not need it for his standing as a writer. [...] As for living writers who would deserve it [...] Marguerite Yourcenar and Julien Gracq.”
One of 100 copies on vélin pur fil (no. 98).
Enriched with an interesting signed typescript letter, addressed to Madame Pirkko-Liisa Stähl and dated September 8, 1977. She had sent Jules Roy, along with a number of other writers, a questionnaire about the Nobel Prize in Literature. Jules Roy's reply reveals his literary admirations: the “ideal type of Nobel laureate in literature: Romain Rolland, Roger Martin du Gard, André Gide, Albert Camus [...] Among the deceased writers who would have deserved the Prize [...] Georges Bernanos. Malraux deserved it too but did not need it for his standing as a writer. [...] As for living writers who would deserve it [...] Marguerite Yourcenar and Julien Gracq.”
Career officer, aviator and writer, Jules Roy won the Prix Renaudot in 1946 for La Vallée heureuse, broke with the army in 1953, published a pamphlet on the Algerian War in 1960, and devoted ten years of his life to the novel cycle Les Chevaux du soleil, dedicated “to those whom nothing has consoled for the loss of a paradise, as well as to those who have won their dignity through pain and violence (…). Thus is told, from 1830 to 1962, the shared adventure of France and Algeria. A dream that has not finished haunting our memories. Who knows? A mirage.”
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