Dujardin (Édouard) Lot n° 31

The laurels are cut. Librairie de la Revue Indépendante, Paris, 1888. Frontispiece etching portrait of the author by Jacques-Émile Blanche. First edition (21.5 x 17.5 cm with witnesses). A gift copy for Stéphane Mallarmé, "maître très vénéré", one of twenty first copies of this work celebrated as the first modern example of the interior monologue, with a double state of the engraved frontispiece by Jacques-Émile Blanche. One of twenty first copies on large French vellum (no. 8) (before 400 copies on English mechanical vellum): "to M. Stéphane Mallarmé, both to the most revered master, and to the excellent friend of the most intimate friendship, Édouard Dujardin". Beneath its somewhat precious appearance, this dedication in fact takes up the process of the interior monologue, letting the mind navigate around the love-friendship-intimacy-generation for its recipient. Handwritten correction by Dujardin on page 62 (word added). The etching frontispiece by Jacques-Émile Blanche is here in double state, in black and sanguine. Édouard Dujardin (1861-1949) was an essayist, magazine editor, religious exegete, businessman, gambler and bookmaker, and a fervent disciple of Mallarmé, whose Poésies he published in nine issues of La Revue indépendante in 1887. Mallarmé said of him: "He was born of a Breton cow and a Norman gabelou". Les lauriers sont coupés still earns its author a public posterity that might have remained more confidential had James Joyce not himself told Valery Larbaud in 1921 that it was the work that inspired him for the many interior monologues in Ulysses, particularly Molly Bloom's in the final chapter. In Dujardin's text, "it is through the uninterrupted and continuous flow of a walking thought, that of a stroller observing the city, that impressions are inscribed that seem directly transmitted to the reader". The character of Daniel Prince, snubbed but also manipulated by an actress, strolls through Paris in an ordinary way, describing the flow of his thoughts and impressions of the moment. Provenance: - From the Bibliothèque Stéphane Mallarmé (Sotheby's, Paris, October 15, 2015, no. 31), which contained seven other works by Dujardin dedicated to Mallarmé - Librairie Michel Scognamillo, Paris, Livres anciens catalog, 2016, no. 46.