La rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque illustrée par Auguste Leroux de 176 compositions gravées par Duplessis, Ernest Florian, Les deux Froment Gusman et Perrichon
WITH a de LUXE POLYCHROME ONLAY BINDING by LEVITZKY
Paris: l’Imprimerie nationale for Éditions d’Art Édouard Pelletan, 21 February 1911. Limited edition, no. 376 of 410, of a total edition of 444.
Quarto (10 ¼” x 7 11/16”, 260mm x 195mm): 4 binder’s blanks, front wrapper, 2 binder’s blanks, 14 2-544 554 562, χ4, 2 binder’s blank, rear wrapper, backstrip, 4 binder’s blanks [$2 signed; –42, 62, 112, 151, 172, 191, 221, 271, 351, 401, 461, 511]. 226 leaves (text: 224, prospectus: 4), pp. 1-9 (limitation, blank, half-title, blank, title, blank, publisher’s note, blank, text) 10-442 [2] (colophon, blank), [8] (title (prospectus: “paraîtra fin janvier 1912”), 3pp. text, full-page chromolithograph, 3pp. text). With 18 full-page lithographs or chromolithographs, of which 2 are hors-texte and and 1 in the prospectus.
Bound in a contemporary polychrome pictorial onlay binding by Grégoire Guimpel Levitzky (signed gilt at the lower edge of the front turn-in) over burgundy morocco. On the front board, a sunken inset of Jacques Tournebroche (cf. p. 9). Within the polychrome and gilt floral border, two vignettes from the text: at lower-left, Elme-Laurent-Jacques Ménétrier (cf. p. 13) with his geese; at lower-right, Tournebroche at the deathbed of abbé Coignard (cf. p. 403). An open blank (vellum) book with a chained pointer at lower center and a putto at upper center. On the spine, four pairs of raised bands. Author gilt to the second panel, title gilt to the fourth. Polychrome floral and gilt borders to the panels. Gilt fleurons and fillets to the head, tail and edges of the boards. Polychrome and gilt doublures with a central panel of deep mauve morocco, facing magenta watered silk, followed (preceded at rear) by a spread of gold-and-purple marbled paper. With the original paper wrappers (including a printed spine) as well as the prospectus bound in. Presented in a slip-case and chemise (presumably also by Levitzky).
The slip-case and chemise split. A very little rubbing to the spine-corners, with the front hinge starting just a few millimeters at head and tail. A shallow strip of tanning to the lower edge of 202-3 (pp. 155-158), not affecting the text. Else fine.
Anatole France (1844–1924) was the quintessential homme de lettres, serving as librarian of the senate from 1876 and occupying fauteuil 38 of the Académie française from 1896. La rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque[1] (published 1893, usually rendered into English as “At the sign of Queen Pédauque,” literally “Queen Goosefoot’s roastery”) is essentially a Bildungsroman, tracking the development of the roaster’s son Jacques Ménétrier under the tutelage of a debauched Capuchin friar. Re-baptized “Jacobus Tournebroche” (Jacques the spit-turner, a job he takes from the family dog), the young man learns the essentials: Latin, Greek and sex via a conveniently randy chamber-maid.
The illustrations, after Auguste Leroux (1871–1954), a pupil of Bonnat, vary in style from precise wood-engravings — a medium reinvigorated by the publisher, Edouard Pelletan — to crayon sketches, translated onto stone (pace the “gravées” of the title) by George Duplessis, Ernest Florian, Eugène and his son Emile-Alphonse Froment, Pierre Gusman and Jules Léon Perrichon. Pelletan’s commission of the illustrations made the book an expensive proposition, well suited to his Éditions d’Art, an imprint with an eye to the rising bibliophile class of the Belle Époque. The present work was limited to 444 examples: 34 in Roman numerals and 410 in Arabic numerals in five classes of paper, the present group being “vélin à la cuve des papeteries du Marais, filigrané ΚΤΗΜΑ ΕΣ ΑΕΙ.”[2]
Apart from the fine presswork, the present volume boasts a fine binding. Grégoire Guimpel Levitzky (or Levitsky (Левицький, Levytsʹkyy) 1885–1969) was a Ukrainian-born fine bookbinder who fled the pogroms of Odessa to Paris in 1905. Most of his bindings are abstract or else painted on vellum. The mosaic of subtly-dyed morocco and vellum here reflect an almost certainly unique reaction of the binder to the text, drawing on the Leroux illustrations in the book (pp. 9, 13 and 403) and adapting them to show central moments and figures in the text. Levitzky has lately been a focus of scholarly interest, particularly of the distinguished Russian book historian Mikhaïl Seslavinski, who through his work drew our attention to this remarkable volume.
Carteret IV.170.
[1] The etymology — picked up cheerily by France in the novel itself — traces ultimately to late Latin “pes [de] auca[e]” (via Occitan): foot of the goose. The figure, associated with Toulouse in the fifth century, has been connected to the Norse goddess Freyja, to mother goose ((ma) Mère l’Oye) of fable and to a historical Visigothic queen inter alia.
[2] From Thucydides I.22: κτήμα τε ες αεί, part of a larger programmatic statement about the historian’s work, viz. that it should be a “treasure forever” rather than “an essay which is to win the applause of the moment.”
Item #JLR0802
Price: $8,750