BÉRAUD, Henri

The Wood of the Hanging Templar (Le Bois du Templier Pendu)...Translated by Samuel Sloan

New York: Macmillan Company, 1930. First American Edition. Octavo (20.5cm.); original cloth in tri-color pictorial price-clipped dust jacket, grey decorative endpapers; [4],269pp.; pictorial title page printed in red and black. Jacket spine heavily sunned, edges rubbed and shelf-worn, loss to top corner of front jacket flap affecting the "he" in "the"; previous owner has written (faintly in ink) "Dangerous Business Louise [?]" on upper jacket cover; very minor foxing to top textblock edge, else Fine in Good or better dust jacket.

Béraud, an Anglophobe and anti-Semitic French journalist and novelist, awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1922, would later be sentenced to death for collaborating with the Vichy government during the Nazi occupation, namely through his contributions to the Fascist weekly paper the Gringoire. Charles de Gaulle would eventually the commute the sentence to life imprisonment after the intervention of numerous French authors, including Françoise Mauriac. This ghost story cum historical novel describes peasant life in a small village during the years leading up to the French Revolution.

Price: $50.00

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