Sapho.

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First edition, one of 175 copies on Holland paper of Daudet's cautionary romantic novel warning against a life of overt debauchery, inscribed by the author on the half-title, "A J. J. Weiss, souvenir affectueux, Alph. Daudet". The recipient was likely Jean-Jacques Weiss (1827-1891), French man of letters, professor, and literary critic. A further 40 copies on Japon were also printed. Daudet adapted this work into a play of the same name in 1885. Sapho "chronicles the tempestuous love story between Fanny LeGrand, the titular character, and Jean Gaussin, a destructive affair marked by a pattern of cohabitation and rupture during which the two characters find they can live neither with nor without each other" (Schultz, p. 99). As was a recurring theme in French literature of the era the title character is "associated by her nickname of Sapho with both lesbianism and sexual excess" (ibid., p. 49). The novel was partly autobiographical, LeGrand based on Daudet's former mistress Marie Rieu, an actress and courtesan to whom he dedicated his only collection of verse, Les Amoureuses (1858), and from whom he contracted the venereal disease which led to his death. Heidi Brevik-Zender, Fashioning Spaces: Mode and Modernity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Paris (2015); Gretchen Schultz, Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth-Century France (2015). Octavo (180 x 115 mm). Contemporary brown half morocco by Petitot, spine lettered in gilt with raised bands, double marbled paper sides, brown marbled endpapers, original yellow paper wrappers bound in at ends. Title page printed in red and black. Bookplate on front pastedown, 4 examples of 20th-century bookseller's cataloguing pasted to final blank. Wear to board edges, joints rubbed and a little tender, inner hinges starting, book block firm, top edge dust toned, margins browned; a very good copy. Seller Inventory # 156308

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