Stendhal / Henry Lemarié - La Chartreuse de Parme - 1970

The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal, watercolors by Henry Lemarié

Published in 1839, this novel ranks among the peaks of nineteenth-century French literature. Stendhal drafted the text in fifty-two days only, in the form of a dictated narration, a feat legendary in the history of letters. The narrative follows the adventures of Fabrice del Dongo, a young Italian nobleman enamored of liberty and Napoleonic glory, from his enthusiastic presence at Waterloo to the intrigues of the court of Parma, passing through his imprisonment at the Farnese Tower and his passion for Clélia Conti. Balzac, in a famous article, immediately hailed the novel as a work of genius.

The edition proposed here, published in 1970 by Marcel Lubineau, belongs to the tradition of the great illustrated bibliophile editions of the twentieth century, which restored to the classics of French fiction a sumptuous setting intended for collectors.

Henry Lemarié, regarded as one of the most sought-after French miniaturists by bibliophiles of the twentieth century, illustrated this edition with fifty-four watercolor drawings, reproduced by stencil (pochoir) by Maurice Beaufumé.

Paris, Marcel Lubineau, publisher, 1970; complete in three volumes, quarto (approximately 28 x 20 cm), with 281, 279 and 275 pages respectively. Fifty-four color drawings by Henry Lemarié, including three frontispieces and fifty-one large in-text illustrations. A numbered copy on Rives B.F.K. vellum, untrimmed.

Binder: the publisher in full morocco leather, mauve, entirely adorned with blind-stamped and gold-tooled decorations, title, volume number, and top edges gilded, linings and endpapers of mauve moiré silk, all in a slipcase. Very slight sunning of the spines, which show some traces of rubbing.