Anatole France; Raphael Freida
Paris: A. Plicque & Cie, 1924.

One of 700 numbered copies on velin de Rives (from a total edition of 781), in a unique fine binding, signed E. Berthet. The upper board with a large painted and incised panel after one of Freida’s plates, the lower board with a smaller panel after a tailpiece, and the central spine compartment with an additional design by the binder. First published in 1890, after serialisation in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1889), Thais is among France’s best-known contes philosophiques: the story of the Alexandrian courtesan Thais and her conversion by the ascetic monk Paphnuce, whose own spiritual certainty disintegrates in the process. Issued in the year of France’s death, this finely illustrated edition is the most desirable of the few books illustrated by Raphael Freida (1877-1942), a pupil of Jean-Paul Laurens. His illustrations emphasise the work’s underlying eroticism, sharpening the tension between ascetic renunciation and sensual desire that defines the narrative.