Lourdes

First edition on ordinary paper.

Bradel binding in chocolate-brown half shagreen, smooth spine, date gilt at the tail, contemporary leather boards japonisants, embossed and polychrome, decorated with gilded and colorful floral motifs, marbled paper endpapers and pastedowns, original wrappers and restored spine preserved, later binding.

Exceptional presentation copy signed by Emile Zola: "à Edmond de Goncourt son ami Emile Zola."

Below the presentation inscription, a manuscript gift inscription by Edmond de Goncourt: "Edmond de Goncourt à Pauline Zeller."

Goncourt had the privilege of hearing Zola speak on several occasions about his rediscovery of the miraculous city that inspired this very popular novel:

"Here he broke off to tell us that he had been to Lourdes, where he had been impressed and amazed by that world of hallucinated believers, and that there was something worthwhile to be written about that revival of faith which in his opinion was responsible for the mysticism to be found at the moment in literature and elsewhere.", (Goncourt Journal, 16 March 1892.) 

 

"I arrived at Lourdes in pouring rain and stopped at a hotel where all the good rooms were already taken. And I was in such a bad mood that I felt like leaving the next morning. But I went out for a while, and the sight of all those sick people, those poor wretches, those dying children carried up to the statue, those men and women lying prostrate in prayer... the sight of that city of faith, born of the hallucinations of that little girl of fourteen, the sight of that grotto, those processions, those stampeding crowds of peasants from Brittany and Anjou...'" (ibid., 26 July 1892).

Despite the stylistic disagreements that set them apart, Edmond nonetheless had the book he received from Zola bound in one of his famous Japanese-style bindings (notoriously fragile at the joints, this example has been expertly reinforced with half shagreen). These superb kami-kawa embossed leathers, sometimes referred to as the cartonnages des Goncourt for having been introduced by the brothers into the world of Parisian bibliophiles, are also the fruit of a fascinating and almost devotional encounter of the Goncourts with Japanese art.

The copy was later presented by Edmond to the woman who had nearly become Madame Edmond de Goncourt: Pauline Zeller, a cousin of Count Tolstoy, whom he had met in the salon of Princess Mathilde. A compelling parallel may be drawn between the tale of two chaste destinies in Lourdes (Pierre Froment and Elise Rouquet) and that of young Pauline, whose diary and account of her first love Edmond obtained in order to write his final novel, Chérie.