Brulant secret

12mo, 309 pages, (2) pages publisher's brochure, uncut, small chip at foot of spine.

210 x 130 mm.

Zweig, Stefan. Burning Secret.
Paris, Grasset, 1945.

First French edition translated by Alzir Hella.

One of 26 copies on Arches vellum, after 12 copies on Montval.

Originally published in German in 1911 under the title Erstes Erlebnis [First Experience], this collection is composed of four short stories: Burning Secret, Twilight Story, Fantastic Night, and The Two Twins.

Alone, a young aristocrat paces the train platform of a mountain station. Arriving at his hotel, eager for any encounter, he catches a glimpse of an elegant woman with a distant air, accompanied by a young boy. Ready to do anything to win her over, he pretends to strike up a friendship with the son to get close to the mother. And soon, little Edgar can't understand the reason—kept secret and sensed as burning—for their sudden transformation…

“Burning Secret plunges us into the torments and delights of underground and forbidden desire. This short story dates from 1913. Zweig was thirty-two years old. Thirty-two, the age at which his romance began with Friderike Maria von Winternitz, a charming woman he had met while she was already married to a man from whom she was bored. The female character in Burning Secret resembles her… Burning Secret features a young Viennese civil servant on holiday who uses a twelve-year-old boy to seduce his mother. The seduction thus first targets the child… Burning Secret is also the questioning of a child about the love his mother has for him and the love he feels for her… Zweig would often feel the need to decipher the enigma of women. There would also always be that childlike need to admire, to understand, to probe the soul. That would be his hallmark, and the success he experienced from his earliest works would never diminish” (Catherine Audibert).

Beautiful uncut paperback copy, as issued.