Le Bonheur dans le Crime; Une des diaboliques
Société Normande du Livre Illustrée, 1897. Limited Edition. 8vo 10 1/2 x 7 inches (265 x 178 mm); half title, frontispiece portrait, title, (2), lxvi, 97 pp. Text in French. Etchings by Monziès, facsimile of letter with black, red and green ink, and frontispiece from a portrait by E. Lévy engraved by Burney. Grey paper over-wrap printed in black, toned on the edges and with a 1/4 inch hole to the top right corner. Interiors clean and bright.
No. 77 of only 85 copies in this special illustrated edition.
A separately issued story from Les Diaboliques (1874) by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. The tale centers on an adulterous relationship between the Count de Serisy and Hauteclaire Stassin, a fencing mistress. The two murder the Count’s wife in order to remain together, escape punishment, and go on to live contentedly—an outcome that deliberately runs against conventional moral expectations.
Framed as a “true” account told by Doctor Torty in the Jardin des Plantes, the story reflects Barbey d’Aurevilly’s interest in transgression, passion, and crime without remorse. Its tone and subject matter contributed to the notoriety of Les Diaboliques on publication. This edition, produced by the Société Normande du Livre Illustrée, reflects the late nineteenth-century taste for finely printed literary texts and illustrated book production.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808 – 1889) was a French novelist, poet, short story writer, and literary critic. He specialized in mystery tales that explored hidden motivation and hinted at evil without being explicitly concerned with anything supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James, Léon Bloy, and Marcel Proust. Beloved of fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d'Aurevilly remains an example of the extremes of late romanticism. He held strong Catholic opinions, yet wrote about risqué subjects, a contradiction apparently more disturbing to the English than to the French. Barbey d'Aurevilly was also known for having constructed his own persona as a dandy, adopting an aristocratic style and hinting at a mysterious past, though his parentage was provincial bourgeois nobility.
Condition: Near fine.
Item number: 2380
Price: $1,000.00
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