Lettres à l’Amazone
Frontispiece woodcut by Pierre-Eugène Vibert, here in a double state.
One of 112 copies on chartreuse-green laid paper, this copy one of 12 hors commerce copies (no. 167).
In 1910, Remy de Gourmont met Natalie Clifford Barney. He was fifty-two. Disfigured since youth by lupus, which had gradually distanced him from society, Gourmont had long led an almost reclusive existence, divided between his work at the Mercure de France, his books and a few friendships.
Natalie Barney was thirty-four. An American writer living in Paris, openly lesbian, she hosted a salon at 20 rue Jacob that would become one of the most celebrated places in twentieth-century Parisian literary life. Their unlikely meeting proved decisive. Gourmont fell in love with this free woman who drew him out of his solitude, and soon gave her the nickname by which she would remain famous: “l’Amazone.” From 1911, Gourmont transformed the Épilogues he published at the Mercure de France into letters addressed to l’Amazone, a correspondence meant simultaneously for her and for the public, in which Gourmont wrote of memory, of the sexes, of chastity, of pleasure, of absence, of desire, of sensation, of forgetting and of nature. Their publication helped fix the nickname: Natalie Barney remained “l’Amazone” until her death in 1972.
The complete printing comprised 5 copies on old Japan paper, 8 on China paper, 50 on Imperial Japan paper, 112 on chartreuse-green paper and 900 on Rives paper.
A fine copy, with tiny losses at the foot.