Gustave FLAUBERT.

Lot 25
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Estimation :
6000 - 8000 EUR
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Result : 14 000EUR
Gustave FLAUBERT.
The Sentimental Education. Histoire d'un jeune homme. Paris, Michel Lévy frères, 1870. 2 volumes in-8 of (2) ff. 427 pp.; (2) ff. 331 pp. in grey half cloth silk à la Bradel with corners, spines gilt at the head and foot, entirely untrimmed (period binding). First edition. One of 25 copies on Hollande laid paper, the only deluxe edition. The critical reception was almost unanimous in castigating what would become the model of the "modern" novel. Only Banville, Zola and George Sand defended Flaubert. L'Éducation sentimentale - the most autobiographical of Flaubert's novels and the portrait of a whole generation - sold very poorly: the 3,000 copies had still not been sold out in 1873. Beautiful autograph letter signed on the false title of the first volume: to my dear & venerable friend, Mr Clogenson, one of the 12 copies on Hollande paper Gve Flaubert (Paris, 27 of November 1869) The Rouen native Jean Clogenson (1785-1876), magistrate and politician (he was deputy of Orne from 1835 to 1839), "met Louis Bouilhet after the publication of Melænis and provided Flaubert, who was beginning to write Salammbô, with information on Tunis and Carthage, which he had just visited. [...] In 1872, he lent a portrait of Aïssé that Flaubert had exhibited in the foyer of the Odéon on the evening of the premiere of Mademoiselle Aïssé" (Guinot, Dictionnaire Flaubert, p. 143). He was a member of the Bouilhet Committee. In his survey of the large paper copies of Gustave Flaubert's novels, Auguste Lambiotte notes that although many copies of Madame Bovary were dedicated by the author (he found 45), he could only trace thirteen copies of Salammbô and barely seven of L'Éducation sentimentale. "Death, too, had taken its toll on the dedicatees of Madame Bovary," he writes, "By the time L'Éducation sentimentale appeared, Baudelaire, Lamartine, Vigny and Sainte-Beuve had disappeared." This copy escaped him. Remarkable copy with all margins, in contemporary binding.
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