Le livre mystique
"The ending of Séraphita resembles a song by Dante" (Taine).
First edition of Séraphita by Honoré de Balzac.
A very fine and wide-margined copy preserved in its contemporary binding.
2 volumes in-12 of: I/ (2) ff., XX and 352 pp.; II/ (2) ff., 357 pp., (1) p.
Quarter brown cloth with corners, marbled paper boards, smooth spine decorated with gilt fillets, library label at the foot of the spine, marbled edges. Contemporary binding.
187 x 125 mm.
Balzac, Honoré de. The Mystical Book.
Paris, Werdet, December 1st, 1835.
First edition of Séraphita, very scarce, dedicated to Mme Hanska.
The first volume includes, with new prefaces, Les Proscrits already published in the Philosophical Novels and Tales, and the third, heavily revised, version of Louis Lambert.
Clouzot, 22; Carteret, I, 70; Vicaire, I, 201.
In a letter to the Duchess de Castries, Balzac expressed his pessimism regarding the book’s success:
“I expect only a distant and late success; it will be appreciated far away and, so to speak, here and there.”
The first edition will be sold in a single day.
Séraphita is preceded by a dedication to Mme Eveline de Hanska, née Countess Rzewuska, whom Balzac was to marry the same year he died.
The narrative has a distinct biographical character, as mentioned in the dedication: it symbolizes the union of Balzac with this “angel” who was, for him, Countess Hanska—a mystical union that the writer would realize on the human level only shortly before his death.
The story is very interesting as it offers us an insight into Balzac’s world of ideas.
Les Proscrits is set at the beginning of the 14th century. In the house of Sergeant Joseph Tirechair, two strangers have taken lodgings, one very young and the other old, whom the sergeant views with suspicion.
“The prodigious richness of this novel is imbued with a youthful romanticism, the first stage of the literary evolution that would lead Balzac to the realism of his maturity.”
Written in the first person, Louis Lambert recounts the meeting, at the Oratorian college in Vendôme, between the author—or rather the narrator—and a highly gifted child: Louis Lambert, born to very poor parents, who was able to study thanks to Mme de Staël’s patronage.
This remarkable novel, notable for its tension and unity of tone, though somewhat removed in form from Balzac’s later works, is essentially the drama of inner adventure.
As early as 1836, Félix Davin in his preface to the Philosophical Studies said that Louis Lambert was the tragedy of “thought killing the thinker.”
A highly attractive, very clean and large-margined copy, preserved in its period binding.
Provenance: Library of Carolus L. B. de Peren, with ex-libris on the endpaper.
