Le Meunier d'Angibault

3 volumes 8vo, half tawny calf, spines decorated with gilt fillets, title and volume labels in red calf, gilt initials L. H. at the foot, sprinkled edges. Contemporary binding.

Sand, George. The Miller of Angibault.
Paris, Desessart, 1845-1846.

First edition.
Clouzot, 244 ; Vicaire, VII, 223.

The characters in this novel want to live and love without regard to money or social class. It is a wonderful love story. In the background, naturally, is Berry, with its newly wealthy peasants, its decadent aristocrats, and its country dances.
Throughout her life, George Sand dreamed of brotherhood and love. Through her work, she wanted to embody this dream and make it possible.

This book belongs to the second period of George Sand’s work, the “socialist” period, alongside Le Compagnon du tour de France and Monsieur Antoine. You can sense the influence of the intellectual ferment leading up to the Revolution of 1848. But the author's socialism is entirely rustic: the book is full of beautiful descriptions of the Berry landscape and country idylls that herald La Mare au diable and Les Maîtres sonneurs. Sand’s socialism is not at all scientific: it is the humanitarian ideal of 1848, the boundless reverie of universal brotherhood through the blurring of class boundaries.
 “George Sand’s literary talent was among the most spontaneous in our literature. She held a very prominent place in 19th-century literature. She renewed the idyll, she transformed the novel. Equally distant from the adventure novel and the purely realist novel, she found a middle genre, which contains both the romantic and the true, where gentle poetry and delicate sensitivity have their place—and which may well be the true French novel. Turgenev, George Eliot, and Dostoyevsky passionately admired her.” (Carteret).

Valuable copy preserved in its period bindings.

Provenance: Library of Ludovic Halévy (with bookplate and gilded initials stamped at the foot of the volumes).

Composer and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Ludovic Halévy (1834-1908) collaborated with the Duke of Morny and was an editor at the Corps législatif in 1861. A playwright, he wrote Carmen for the Opéra-Comique, for which Bizet composed the music.