Les plaisirs et les jours

First edition, one of 20 numbered copies on japon, most limited issue.

A magnificent contemporary binding signed Huser, full brown morocco, spine with five raised bands, the covers with a wide honeysuckle border composed of blind tooling and white and green morocco onlays, similar decoration in compartments of spine, cream morocco doublures, brown watered silk endleaves, gilt edges, original wrappers bound in, housed in a slipcase by the same binder. 

The most luxurious copy of Proust's first book, a spectacular debut that would lead to his famous pistol duel with Jean Lorrain. 

Illustrated with 76 compositions by Madeleine Lemaire, including 14 plates on a tinted ground wood-engraved by Rougeron Vignerot, and complete with the original signed watercolour by Madeleine Lemaire found only in the copies on japon.

As a prelude to Lost Time, it is of course inseparable from the contributions of the artists who would punctuate Proust's life and his famous Search: it was indeed at Madeleine Lemaire's, on 22 May 1894, that Proust first met Reynaldo Hahn, at the first concert of his Chansons grises. Proust's affair with Reynaldo coincides with the period in which Les Plaisirs et les Jours was taking shape, while Hahn was composing his Île du rêve.   

This original watercolour by Lemaire in itself evokes the budding work of the young writer: a delicate sprig of winter heath, whose early blossoms seem to mirror the talent of Proust, then aged 25 when this first book was published. These “pink heather flowers” would reappear in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, in the Balbec landscape associated with the beautiful Mademoiselle de Stermaria: “Together we would have roamed that island impregnated with so intense a charm for me because it had enclosed the everyday life of Mlle de Stermaria and lay at rest in her remembering eyes. For it seemed to me that I would not really have possessed her except there, when I would have traversed those regions that enveloped her in so many memories.” (translation William C. Carter)

This copy, in its superb floral binding, is rivalled only by the japon copy bound by Meunier once in Jacques Guérin's great Proust collection (sold at auction, 4 June 1986). Since then, only a handful of japon copies of Pleasures have come to light. We are able to trace seven copies while others are now in public collections, notably Paul Morand's copy at the Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France and Montesquiou's at the Orsay Museum.

“This calendar of Pleasures and Days marks both the hours of nature, through harmonious pictures of sky, sea and woods, and the hours of mankind, through faithful portraits and genre paintings of marvellous finish. Marcel Proust delights equally in describing the desolate splendour of the setting sun and the restless vanities of a snobbish soul. He excels in recounting elegant sorrows and artificial sufferings, which are at the very least as cruel as those that nature bestows upon us with motherly prodigality. [...] Happy is his book! It will go about the town all adorned, all perfumed with the flowers that Madeleine Lemaire has strewn upon it with that divine hand which scatters roses together with their dew.” So writes Anatole France, the future Bergotte, in the preface.

A legendary work of Proustian juvenilia, in which nonetheless “everything that would later blossom so splendidly in those long novels is offered in its nascent state in this book, fresh buds of those broad flowers, everything we would later admire.” (André Gide, “En relisant les Plaisirs et les Jours”, Hommage à Marcel Proust, Nouvelle Revue française, 1 January 1923).

Provenance: book-labels of Raoul Simonson; José Peraya.