Pour qui sonne le glas

Later edition, no deluxe issue printed.

Rare presentation copy dated 1953 and signed by Ernest Hemingway at the Ritz to Madame Robert Faroux: "For madame Robert Faroux with sincere good wishes. Ernest Hemingway. Ritz 1953."

Hemingway was at the very height of his fame when he penned this inscription in 1953, most likely whilst having a drink (or many!) at the Ritz bar: The Old Man and the Sea had just appeared (1952), and the Nobel Prize would follow the very next year. The inscription most likely dates from his stay at the Ritz with his wife Mary Welsh, prior to his final safari in Africa. For the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls, this palace was no mere stopover or luxurious backdrop: since the 1920s, the hotel had been his natural habitat, the crucible in which the Hemingway myth was forged.

The Ritz is of course the setting of one of the most legendary episodes of his adventures: the story (so thoroughly Hemingwayesque, it hardly matters if it is true or embellished) has it that he arrived at the front desk at the head of a small armed detachment to "liberate" the hotel from its Nazi occupiers in 1944, promptly ordering a round of dry Martinis.

After forging his warrior legend within these very walls, Hemingway discussed For Whom the Bell Tolls  in that same bar with Mike Burke, American spy and future director of the Yankees. Burke had reread the novel before being parachuted into France alongside the Free French Forces – making the book, in a sense, as much a manual of resistance as a war novel.

His idyllic days at the hotel would inspire Hemingway's posthumous short story A Room on the Garden Side, recounting the days following the Liberation. The protagonist Robert [the same first name as the hero of this novel!] sips champagne in a Ritz bedroom, conversing about the war, French writers, and literature with the hotel manager and André Malraux: "How different it was, when you were there", Hemingway wrote in this short story.

The writer even left a piece of himself behind: when a trunk abandoned for nearly thirty years in the cellars of the Ritz was finally opened in 1956, the discovery amounted to an archaeological dig. Among the ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence were the famous notebooks in which he had set down his life as a young bohemian writer in 1920s Paris. It was precisely this chance encounter with the materials of his own youth, preserved in the legendary hotel on the Place Vendôme, that prompted him to shape A Moveable Feast, completed just before his death.

A trace of his many stays endures in this exceptional copy of Hemingway's masterpiece: "I like to remember us in the dining room at the Ritz with our own world and the others could keep theirs" (letter to Mary Welsh, 11 September 1944).