Description

ORIGINAL EDITION ofhis article on Proust, written to coincide with the reissue by Gallimard of Swann's Way and first appeared in Art sheets on 31 May 1919.
One of 30 copies on white vellum after 1 copy on yellow rag vellum and 5 copies on vellum under special cover; limited edition of 36 copies.

Giraudoux opens the article with a reflection on the literary rupture introduced by the war, then promises the reader to make him "desire a novelist", a task he accomplishes by means of a pastiche: "Wouldn't you like a writer to lock himself up at home one day, at the age of thirty, and from then on write non-stop, in a corked room with barred windows, so that the rumours of Boulevard Haussmann don't reach him? [...] Don't you want him to deliver to us at last, like small volumes, small sentences; to each of them he should attach, as he does to flies, a paper tail, a long incident that makes it rustle and swell in the sun, that in the rain turns it into a long, soft form, a poor thing."(pp. 8-9)
Proust was an admirer of Giraudoux, whom he involved in The Guermantes side in the guise of thenew writer"However, he wrote to Paul Morand: "The article made me laugh out loud. But to be honest, nothing about me was accurate."

This booklet is the 4th volume in the collection "Le Bahut des aromates", which will comprise 14 volumes, including two previously unpublished works by Céline. Published between 1933 and 1937 according to their publisher Pierre Aelberts, they are more likely to be later and backdated (1970s).

A new edition of the text, based on the manuscript of the article held by the Bibliotheca Proustiana, will be published in 2021; bilingual in French and German, it includes a preface by Reiner Speck and an essay by Jürgen Ritte.