MIOMANDRE (Francis de). - Lot 162

MIOMANDRE (Francis de). Born in Tours. 1880-1959. French writer and translator. M.A.S. from "Francis de Miomandre". S.l.n.d. 11 pages in-8, "L'Evolution du Divan". S.l.n.d. 11 pages in-8, "L'Evolution du Divan". Francis de Miomandre humorously recounts a brief "history of the divan": If the old dictionaries define the divan as a ... "sort of chaise-longue with or without a back, used as a seat in certain waiting rooms and in some cafés known as cafés-divans"... there was a time when it was a piece of furniture used mainly in waiting rooms. ...But, then, what was it replaced by in the living room? Well, precisely nothing. The sofa was ignored. Only a few travelers spoke of it as something they'd seen in the Orient, used for siestas and long lazes by a people unaccustomed to action and unaware of our modern progress. They had not the slightest idea of acclimatizing it here. [...] Among us, the sofa reigned, this correct, well-mannered, reasonable piece of furniture, made for gentlemen and ladies wisely seated, hands on knees, and chatting about general ideas, or mundane gossip [...]. He reigned for a long time, and it seemed as if he would never be dethroned. [...] However, this revolution took place, and happier than many others, without finding anyone to regret the past. [...] So many things in literature, art, politics and morality can be explained by the advent of the couch, and can only be explained by it! [...] The divan does not come to us from the East itself. But through Russia, which is a bit of the Orient, of course, but a less aggressive and, as it were, Europeanized Orient. We're less wary. What one would refuse from a Tartar, one accepts from a Muscovite. The number of couches consumed in Russian novels is incredible... Proof that it's the same in real life. The heroes of Pushkin, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky spend a large part of their lives dreaming and chatting on a couch. It's there that he meditates on the complication of love and the malfeasance of this incomprehensible universe. It's where he rebuilds society, and God knows what he's capable of when he gets up to apply these ideas. It is, in short, where he leads his true life, which is the inner life. [...] There was quite a long struggle between the sofa and the couch. The sofa, in order to maintain its faltering domination, defended itself with many mimicry devices. It deepened, spread out, became a chaise-longue, a pouf, what do I know? His paltry efforts could not save him. You'll find his final triumphs in Marcel Proust's novels (or at least in that preliminary part that takes place in the time, forever lost, of Charles Swann)... But ... the couch settled in, now invincible. He was not content to be there. He still had to be alone... and ...he began to spill out. [...] From the living room and boudoir, he made his way to the bedroom [...] the study, [...] the dining room and the anteroom. [...] By dint of being so universally attractive by virtue of its practicality, and in a way magnetic, the sofa very quickly lost its status as a piece of furniture. It became the focal point around which the decoration and furnishing of the entire home was organized... Francis de Miomandre won the Goncourt in 1908 for his fifth book, Ecrit sur de l'eau. "As the award was unexpected, and no one had read the book, which had a print run of five hundred copies published by Le Feu de Marseille, the articles devoted to it by the critics were disarmingly fanciful. Le Temps, among others, gravely asserted that it was a study in the mores of ocean liners! For a time, he took part in the "Club des longues moustaches" [1908-1911], an informal literary group that met at the Caffè Florian in Venice.