Mon fils, sa femme et mon amie
One of 25 copies printed separately on Hollande paper (no. 25).
Mon fils, sa femme et mon amie belongs to that Belle Époque Parisian literature which turns marriage, adultery, sentimental arrangements and bourgeois conventions into the material of a comedy of manners.
Pierre Valdagne brings to the novel a mechanism he knew perfectly well as a playwright; the book was indeed presented as an “epistolary vaudeville,” a formula that fairly captures its hybrid nature.
Valdagne joined Paul Ollendorff as literary director in 1886, and for some twenty years served there as reader and editorial advisor. His first publisher was thus also his employer. The Ollendorff firm was at the time one of the great Parisian literary houses, with a list that included Maupassant, Octave Mirbeau, Alphonse Allais, Jean Lorrain, Paul Adam, Jules Renard and Abel Hermant.