MIOMANDRE (Francis de). - Lot 217

MIOMANDRE (Francis de). Born in Tours. 1880–1959. French writer and translator. M.A.S. by “Francis de Miomandre.” No place, no date. 11 pages, in-8 format, “The Evolution of the Divan.” No place, no date. 11 pages, in-8, “The Evolution of the Divan.” Francis de Miomandre humorously recounts a brief “history of the divan”:While old dictionaries define the divan as a …“kind of chaise longue, with or without a backrest, used as seating in certain waiting rooms and in some cafés known as ‘café-divans’”… there was a time when it was a piece of furniture used primarily in waiting rooms. …But then, what replaced it in the parlor? Well, precisely—nothing. People were unaware of the divan. Only a few travelers spoke of it as something they had seen over there, in the East, which was used for naps and the long idleness of a people unaccustomed to any kind of activity, unaware of our modern progress. They had not the slightest idea of how to adapt it to our way of life. [...] Here, the sofa reigned supreme—that proper, well-mannered, sensible piece of furniture, made for gentlemen and ladies sitting demurely, hands on their knees, and discussing general ideas or social gossip [...]. It reigned for a long time; it seemed it would never be dethroned. [...] Yet this revolution took place—and more happily than many others—without anyone lamenting the past. [...] How many things in literature, art, politics, and morality can be explained by the advent of the divan—and can be explained only by it! [...] The divan did not come to us directly from the East. But rather through Russia, which, incidentally, is somewhat the East—of course—but a less aggressive and, so to speak, Europeanized East. People are less wary. What one would refuse from a Tatar, one accepts from a Muscovite. The sheer number of divans featured in Russian novels is incredible... Proof that it’s the same in real life. A hero of Pushkin, Turgenev, or Dostoevsky spends a large part of his life daydreaming and chatting on a divan. It is there that he meditates on the complexities of love and the flaws of this incomprehensible universe. It is there that he reconstructs society, and God knows what he is capable of when he gets up to put these ideas into practice. It is, all in all, there that he leads his true life—which is his inner life. [...] There was a rather long struggle between the sofa and the divan. The sofa, in an attempt to maintain its faltering dominance, defended itself with all manner of mimetic tricks. It deepened, spread out, became a chaise longue, a pouf—who knows what else? Its derisory efforts could not save it. You’ll find its final triumphs recorded in Marcel Proust’s novels (or at least in that preliminary section set in the forever-lost era of Charles Swann)... But … the divan took hold, now invincible. It was not content merely to be there. It still needed to be alone… and … it began to spread out. [...] From the parlor and the boudoir, it made its way into the bedroom [...] the study, [...], and even into the dining room and the antechamber. [...] By virtue of being everywhere, attractive for its convenience and, in a way, magnetic, the sofa very quickly lost its identity as a piece of furniture. It became the focal point around which the decor and layout of the entire home were organized... Francis de Miomandre won the Goncourt Prize in 1908 for his fifth book, *Ecrit sur de l’eau*. “Since this award was unexpected and no one had read the book—which had been printed in a run of five hundred copies by the publisher of the Marseille magazine *Le Feu*—the articles critics wrote about it were disarmingly fanciful. Le Temps, among others, solemnly asserted that it was a study of manners aboard the great ocean liners!” For a time, he was a member of the “Club des longues moustaches” [1908–1911], an informal literary group that met at Caffè Florian in Venice.