La foire aux vanités

First edition of the French translation established by Georges Guiffrey.

Beige half roan binding, spine with four raised bands framed by black fillets, slight rubbing to the bands, boards, marbled endpapers and pastedowns.

"In 1855, if my memory serves, Georges Guiffrey set about translating Vanity Fair with Thackeray's blessing: the perfection of this version makes it very nearly a masterpiece of nineteenth-century French literature. A critic nevertheless found occasion to take issue with its recent reissue, on the grounds that it had been given no more than a discreet dusting-off. Guiffrey's French strikes him as dated; but Thackeray's English would strike him no less so. In his view, a new version was called for! The adulation of recent translations at the expense of period translations would have delighted the author of The Book of Snobs." (Maxime Cohen, Promenades sur la lune, 2008).