Jean Santeuil

3 volumes 4° Tellière, green morocco with frame on cover, gilt fillet, decorated spine, gilt top edges, covers and spine preserved. Maylander.

213 x 165 mm.

Proust, Marcel. Jean Santeuil.
Paris, Gallimard, Nrf, 1952.

First posthumous edition.

One of the 110 copies numbered printed on vergé and printed in 4° tellière, only large paper printed. 
H. C. It bears number 17.

As soon as 1896, Marcel Proust, in his letters to close friends, announced that he had begun writing a major novel, “a long-term project” to which he attached great importance. But it was not until around 1950 that Bernard de Fallois, who was preparing a dissertation on the author of *In Search of Lost Time* and sifting through the mountains of papers, notes, and various drafts left behind by Marcel Proust, unearthed the manuscript of *Jean Santeuil*. This novel, more than a thousand pages long, is not exactly, as was long believed and said, a “first draft” of *In Search of Lost Time*, although it is true that the essential themes of Proust’s magnum opus are already present in it.

Jean Santeuil begins with two people meeting a well-known novelist who, before dying, leaves them the manuscript of a novel they will publish, in which Jean Santeuil is the hero. A highly sensitive young boy (very similar to the young Marcel in *Du côté de chez Swann*), Jean Santeuil is awakened to the world of love through the passion he feels first for his mother, then for a young girl, Marie Kossicheff (in whom we can already recognize Gilberte Swann).

Jean Santeuil, the first draft of Marcel Proust’s “masterpiece” already attests to his constant search for the essence of things and his confidence in the artist’s mission to express and preserve it.

A very fine copy on large paper in an elegant binding by Maylander.

Charles Hayoit’s library, with ex-libris ; Château de Tournay.