Bookstore

Le côté de Guermantes I

1921140 x 195 mm

FIRST EDITION.
INSCRIBED AND SIGNED.

4 000 

Sold

Description

À La recherche du temps perdu tome IV: le côté de Guermantes I.

FIRST EDITION with the printed copy dated 17 August 1920.
Fictitious mention of 3rd edition.

AUTOGRAPH SIGNED MAILING:

"Deep tribute
sympathy to Mr
Régismansand
Marcel Proust"

Charles Henri Eugène Régismanset (1873 - 1945), a doctor of law and a graduate of the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, was for a large part of his life a senior civil servant employed by the Ministry of the Colonies. Wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, after enlisting in March 1915, he received the Croix de Guerre and then the Légion d'honneur in 1917. Elected to the Academy of Colonial Sciences in 1922, he was appointed Director of the General Agency for the Colonies between 1924 and 1926, then Director of Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Finance before being seconded to the Bank of Indochina.
In parallel to his ministerial career, Charles Henri Eugène Régismanset was a prolific writer, editor of Mercure de France for some twenty years, he published from 1900 to 1939 nearly thirty works ranging from colonial reportage to Perfume Philosophy (1907), from a collection of poems to a novel. His literary fame, to his great displeasure, remained very limited and, according to Léautaud, Régismanset entrusted Marie Dormoy : "It's amazing, Valery has only published one book, everyone talks about it. I've published more than twenty volumes and no one's ever said anything about it. 
Regismansand yet knew a certain recognition thanks to the series entitled Contractions, short works composed of maxims, also short and striking, like this one published in the first volume by Sansot in 1906: "Tell me who you hate, I'll tell you who you haunt. "

After reading the Coté de GuermanteRégismanset wrote an article published in  Book review of the Colonial dispatch 4-5 September 1921: "[...] Choderlos de Laclos, writing at the beginning of the 19th century to his delicious young wife who was complaining of being a little overweight, gallantly declared: " Of you, my dear friend, he can never have too much! I would gladly say the same of Mr Marcel Proust, of his work, that is to say, which is a real treat for the mind.. […] Is it my fault, too, that Marcel Proust has such an original talent that he captivates even the snobs, and that he writes books that are memoirs rather than novels, and whose diversity and plasticity escape the methodical and banal account. [...] "
Proust wrote Régismanset on October 14, 1921, for the "thank you for your [sound] superb article in the Dépêche Coloniale" : "It would have been great fun for me to complete my Guermantes side, as you do, with a hundred anecdotes like yours about the post-war Guermantes. I remember, when I was very young, hearing M. d'Haussonville parody a maxim of La Rochefoucault, saying that the false nobility was a tribute that the bourgeois paid to the real nobility."

Régismanset had already published articles on Marcel Proust in the same section, on 21-22 September 1919 and 14 December 1920. It would publish another on 24 October 1922, entitled "The mind of Marcel Proust"..

Philip Kolb, Correspondence by Marcel Proust, XX, n°290 ,494-495.
Proustian newsletter, Unpublished works from the exhibition Proust du temps perdu au temps retrouvé, No. 42 (2012), pp. 177-184 (8 pages).

Paris,Published by the New French Review,1921.In-12, Softcover140 x 195 mm,279 pp.

Restored split to lower spine.
Spine slightly oiled.

Bio

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust, born in Paris on July 10, 1871 and died in Paris on November 18, 1922.

See The Works