RUSKIN John Sésame et les Lys. Des trésors des rois. Des jardins des reines. Traduction, note et préface par Marcel Proust.

Bouillaguet & Rogers, Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, notice de G. Henrot, p. 466.

First edition of the translation and preface by Marcel Proust. Copy regular paper, numbered 607 (there were also 12 on Hollande paper).

This is Proust’s second attempt to acclimatise John Ruskin’s work in France, published on the eve of the inauguration of La Recherche. Proust had already exercised his talents as a translator – with the help of his mother – on another work by the leader of the English aesthetic school, La Bible d’Amiens (Paris, Mercure de France, 1904).

It was his friend Robert de Billy who had introduced Marcel to the cults of Ruskin’s Gothic religion, igniting a flame that the young writer was to keep burning throughout his many artistic pilgrimages in the company of Reynaldo Hahn, Marie Nordlinger, Emmanuel Bibesco and Bertrand de Fénelon. Proust’s first article on John Ruskin appeared in 1900 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.

Sésame et les Lys contains translations of two lectures. The first, Des trésors des rois, was first published in April-May 1905 in Les Arts de la vie. The preface, entitled ‘Sur la lecture’, appeared in La Renaissance latine on 15 June 1905. This fifty-page essay, in which the translator recalls his memories as a young reader – criticising in passing the theories of his idol Ruskin – is of capital importance for the history of the formation of the Proustian text. After being reworked, it was merged into the Recherche and published separately in Pastiches et mélanges in 1919, under the title ‘Journées de lecture’.

Paper toned, as usual.