Sésame et les Lys

Marcel Proust became interested in Ruskin’s work in the autumn of 1899, when he immersed himself in the writings of the man he called “this great man,” after discovering the chapter entitled “The Lamp of Memory” in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. It was a revelation.

Learning of the art critic’s death a few months later, he wrote to Marie Nordlinger, an English friend and cousin of Reynaldo Hahn, expressing both his sorrow and his wish to ensure the survival of Ruskin’s work. He then prepared several tributes to Ruskin, in the form of obituary articles and notes that, considerably expanded, would become the peritexts of his future translation of La Bible d’Amiens. It was an arduous task, since Proust barely knew English: it was his mother who did the word-for-word work, thus playing a crucial part in the translation of La Bible d’Amiens. When she fell ill, she was replaced in this pioneering role by Marie Nordlinger, once Proust turned to Sésame et les lys, with the help of Robert d’Humières, Kipling’s translator at the Mercure de France. After his mother’s death, Proust took up the proofs again and wrote to Marie Nordlinger: “I have closed forever the era of translations that Mama favored.” By his own admission, he wished to devote himself to his own work, and with this in mind decided to precede his translation with a highly important preface, a delightful text entitled “Sur la lecture” (“On Reading”): “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we thought we were leaving unlived, those we spent with a favorite book. In this preface, I have merely tried, in my turn, to reflect on the same subject Ruskin had treated: the usefulness of reading. Ruskin gave his lecture the symbolic title Sesame, the magic word that opens the door of the thieves’ cave being the allegory of reading, which opens for us the door of those treasures in which the most precious wisdom of mankind is enclosed: books.” Revised, these 52 pages would later be included in Pastiches et mélanges under the title “Journée de lecture.”

A precious copy on Hollande paper, this one belonging to Jeanne Jacquemin. A self-taught painter, she caused a sensation at her first exhibition in 1892 and astonished with her androgynous, sensual appearance: the red-haired young woman with “Pre-Raphaelite eyes” perfectly embodied Symbolism. A member of the Rose-Croix society, she was admired by Huysmans, Verlaine and Odilon Redon, and formed a friendship of mutual admiration with Stéphane Mallarmé. The “green-eyed paintress,” as he nicknamed her, is frequently mentioned in Edmond de Goncourt’s Journal; she contributed several lithographs to L’Estampe moderne and illustrated La Mandragore, a “Conte de Noël” by Jean Lorrain published in 1894. Suffering from depression, she was treated by Dr. Samuel Pozzi, the father of French gynecology, who knew le Tout-Paris intimately. A lover of Sarah Bernhardt, nicknamed “Docteur Dieu,” he was a friend of the Proust family: of the father, Professor Adrien Proust, the renowned epidemiologist, as well as of his sons Robert (who was his student at the Hôpital Broca) and Marcel (for whom he obtained, in 1914, the medical exemption that spared him from being sent to the front). He encouraged the development of radiotherapy, notably at the Hôpital Tenon, where the oncology and radiotherapy department now bears his name. He treated Jeanne Jacquemin for many years.

The copy later passed through the hands of the bookseller Ronald Davis — it was probably he who had it bound, as he did for an entire set of Proust’s works in the late 1920s (Christie’s, London, 2007, lot 133), including a Swann and this volume on Hollande paper.

On this same paper, only the following copies are otherwise known: the Léon Blum copy (held at the BnF); no. 2 (binding by Maylander, Simonson-Hayoit-Leroy collections); no. 8 (R. and B. Loliée collection). None of the 12 copies was included in the 1971 exhibition Proust et son temps.

From the library of Jeanne Jacquemin (bookplate).