Alexis ou le vain traité du combat

 New edition with some parts in first edition, expanded with a new preface.

Minor tears at the head and foot of the spine, a few small stains and marginal tears to the covers.

Presentation inscription signed by Marguerite Yourcenar to Jane Bathori, the French mezzo-soprano, choral conductor, teacher, theatre director and film-maker, enriched with a Greek epithet used to describe to the Emperor Hadrian, the "supremely musical sovereign": "βασιλευς Μουσικοτατος", as a tribute to the dedicatee's artistry.

"Yourcenar belongs to those generations for whom homosexuality was an election reserved for a small number of chosen spirits.", remarked Dominique Fernandez. It is precisely to another of these chosen spirits that Yourcenar alludes in this inscription to the performer who premiered numerous songs by Debussy, Ravel and Satie, as well as works by Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc, among many others.

This inscription was written shortly after the publication of Memoirs of Hadrian in 1951, which explains the use of this epithet borrowed from Athenaeus of Naucratis in his Deipnosophistae. Nor is it insignificant that the inscription appears in this reissue of Yourcenar's first book, Alexis, or the Treatise of the Vain Struggle, composed as a long letter from a man to the wife he is leaving in order to embrace his homosexuality, though he never explicitly names his natural inclination.  Whether Yourcenar knew of Bathori's first marriage (one of convenience?) to her singing teacher Engel remains unknown. Widowed in 1927, Bathori then began in 1935 a relationship with the woman who would become her lifelong companion.

 The lives of the singer and the author followed strikingly similar paths: both went into exile during the Second World War with their respective partners, Jane Bathori to Argentina with the actress Andrée Tainsy, and Yourcenar to the United States with Grace Frick, which would become her adopted country.

A fine token of friendship from one of the greatest French literary voices to one of the foremost interpreters of twentieth-century music.