Signé ; Roger Nimier - Les épées [E.O. en S.P. - Envoi autographe-Relié-Provenance] - 1948

Roger Nimier

The Swords

Paris Gallimard Library, 1948, octavo of 213 pages.

Fine autographed dedication by the author on the flyleaf to René Benjamin, writer, journalist, lecturer: "For René Benjamin whom I have always read at the same time as Balzac — only regretting that there is not a 'Life of René Benjamin' by Balzac..."

René Benjamin is the author of a series of moral studies on the Court, the Sorbonne, the Auction House. His novel, Gaspard, won the Goncourt Prize in 1915. He wrote it in Tours hospital, where he stayed for several months after being seriously wounded in 1914. He has had several plays produced in the theatre and did portraiture work with books devoted to Antoine, Barrès, Balzac, Maurras, Sacha Guitry and Molière. His Prodigious Life of Honoré de Balzac (1925) gave the kickoff to the celebrated in its time collection of the "Novel of Great Existence" at Plon publishing. Friend of Maurras and Léon Daudet, he supported Marshal Pétain during the German occupation. He had joined the Goncourt Academy in 1938, but from 1944 on, whereas La Varende preferred to resign, he was no longer summoned to the academy lunches, just like Jean Ajalbert and Sacha Guitry.

ORIGINAL EDITION, in press service — Prayer to insert preserved.

Summary: In one of his familiar dreams, François Sanders sees himself cleaving the void with a sword, but the blood that appears on the blade is his own: it is a symbol in which he recognizes his tendency to strike blows that will "wound him himself." This romantic appetite for suffering came to him at fifteen when, a man’s heart in a child’s body, he resented the waiting imposed on adolescents before he could live an existence that he desires to be full of insolent grace, elegance, and lightness in the spirit of the eighteenth century. A grace embodied, another symbol, by Claude, his beloved sister who began to live, without him, with others than him. Jealous? Who knows what goes on in François’s head? He is now a lone ranger, perpetual enemy of what he deems stupid, dirty, and ugly. This stance drives him down strange paths when the 1939 war mobilizes youths of his age: a resistance fighter tasked with killing the Milice chief and becoming a militiaman, François will have the best opportunities to exercise his taste for intellectual and sentimental paradox. This yields a brilliant portrait of a teenage rebel against the confusion of his century, where one finds many traits dear to Roger Nimier.

Binding with green velvet spine, red cover and back preserved (tear repaired on the cover, back missing).