Éoriginal edition
de this “rare and regarded work as containing the author’s most beautiful tales ».
Beautiful large margin copy preserved in its binding of the period.
Daudet, Alphonse. Letters from my Windmill. Impressions and memories.
Paris, J. Hetzel, n.d. [1869].
In-12 of (2) leaves, 302 pages. Bound in green half-chagrin, spine richly ornamented, top edge gilt on witnesses. Binding of the period.e.
180 x 113 mm.
Original edition of this work by Alphonse Daudet “very rare and highly sought after” (Clouzot, 44).
Carteret, I, 191; Vicaire, III, 37; Backer’s Library 2069; Talvart, IV, 13.
“Rare and regarded book as containing the author’s most beautiful tales” (Carteret).
There was no grand paper edition.
“Collection of tales by Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) which, as everyone knows, established the author’s reputation. It heralds the various novels that Daudet would soon dedicate to Provence and which are the best of his work. A faithful child of Provence, Daudet was nostalgic until his death, feeling in Paris the soul of an exile. Always passionate about southern life he enjoyed writing about its smallest aspects: prose ballads, naive stories, parables, fantastic and humorous, without forgetting the landscape: Daudet excels in making the best of everything. Some preamble in the form of a bill of sale informs us that the poet acquired an old Provençal mill, in order to give free rein to his daydreams. It is there that he scribbled the thirty or so Letters that comprise the volume.
Apart from ‘L’Arlésienne’, the most famous of these tales are: ‘The Goat of Monsieur Seguin’, ‘Master Cornille’s Secret‘, ‘The Pope’s Mule’, ‘The Curate of Cucugnan‘, ‘The Sub-Prefect in the Fields’, ‘The Legend of the Man with the Golden Brain’…
What is especially appreciated here is an incomparable mix of humor, verve, and emotion. But their primary quality will remain the sympathy with which the author is attached to the humble, to animals and plants, with an unfailing solicitousness. The work is that of a ‘goldsmith’ who, with a single stroke of the finest finesse, can create a climate and outline a character whose relief will allow him to remain legendary. It is this simplicity and the art of never ’emphasizing’ anything that makes him one of our greatest storytellers“. (Dictionnaire des Œuvres, IV, 172).
“The Letters from my Windmill appeared in successive series between August 1866 and October 1869. The originality of this collection of nearly thirty texts is still masked today by the fame of a few of them…
The Letters from my Windmill are actually characterized by a somber, sometimes tragic overall tone. The brief story of L’Arlésienne, popularized, in its staged version, by Bizet’s music, is the most relentless illustration of it; (…) it is the infinite variety of the Letters from my Windmill that deserves the most to be highlighted, and which best justifies recommending reading them in full” (In French in the text, no. 291).
Beautiful large margin copy preserved in its binding of the period.
We were able to locate only 5 copies of this rare original in all the French Institutions: at the B.n.F., in the Libraries of Dijon, Pau et Clermont-Ferrand and at the Institute of France in Paris.
