‘Little Jewels’ – Railway Reading
DAUDET, Alphonse.
Lettres de mon moulin. Impressions et souvenirs. Paris, J. Hetzel et Cie, [1869].
8vo, pp. [4], 302; some light spotting as usual; but a very good copy, uncut, in the original printed wrappers; a few marks and chips to wrappers; housed in a half morocco bookform chemise with marbled sides, in matching slipcase; contemporary blind-embossed stamp ‘Colportage – Chemins de Fer’ to half-title, bookseller’s ticket ‘Librairie le Tour du Monde’ to chemise.
First edition, rare, the issue arbitrarily designated ‘deuxième édition’ but published alongside the first, of Letters from my Windmill, Daudet’s celebrated sketches of Provençal life.
Written in the first person, Daudet’s (1840–1897) short stories appeared first in Le Figaro between August 1866 and October 1869, before being published in book form in 1869 and in countless editions from that time on. The edition was arbitrarily classified by the publisher into multiple issues to give the impression of popularity, but all from the same sheets and issued simultaneously: our copy bears the words ‘deuxième édition’ on the upper printed wrapper.
Particularly well-known are ‘L’Élixir du Révérend père Gaucher’, in which a priest produces a wildly popular elixir to save his monastery from ruin; ‘La Chèvre de Monsieur Seguin’, featuring a fight between a talking, runaway she-goat and a wolf; and ‘Les trois messes basses’, in which a gluttonous priest rushes through Christmas mass, distracted by the promise of truffled turkeys. In Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin the reader finds ‘all the qualities which distinguish this writer’s work: infinite pity, a comfortable optimism, and a spirit of genuine humour, which at times develops into rollicking fun … The infinite capacity for taking pains, which has been described as synonymous with genius, is here most strikingly exemplified. Zola speaks of these stories as “little jewels”’ (Sherard, Alphonse Daudet (1894), p. 355).
‘“In the interest of authors and the book trade”, the Ministry of the Interior developed an embossed stamp that read “Colportage: Chemins de Fer”. Use of a stamp particularly for books sold in railroad bookstores broadened the latitude of works considered appropriate for sale in train stations because ... it “facilitated the sale in stations of work whose circulation is not at all authorized by ordinary colportage”. Implicit in this statement was the belief that books that might disturb or challenge the traditional beliefs and values of rural French citizens, such as those critical of the church and government, were acceptable for sale to more sophisticated train travelers who might read them with a more critical eye’ (De Marco, Reading and Riding (2006), p. 70)
Carteret I, pp. 191–2 (‘livre rare et estimé); En français dans le texte 291; Vicaire III, col. 37.