Juliette. Translated By Austryn Wainhouse. First Complete American Edition. Six Volumes In One The Marquis De Sade Fiction,French Literature,Novels

big thick black full cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). heavy book, international or priority shipping will cost extra. dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. couple of tiny edge nicks on the rear, not price clipped. nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing so stated. decorative endpapers. x+1205p. bibliography. french literature. french history. novels. fiction. ~ In 1797 there appeared an enormous, ten~volume work, illustrated with a hundred and forty~two engravings, which must be classified as one of the most ambitious, outrageous, and extraordinary works of literature ever written. The work is divided into two parts, of which the first, entitled The New Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue, comprised four volumes and represented the Marquis' reworking of two earlier versions of the same tale; the second, in six volumes, was called Juliette, her Sister, or the Prosperities of Vice. Together they form the panels of an immense diptych, perhaps unrivaled in all literature~interrelated but distinctly opposite sides of the same coin. If Justine is virtue personified, her sister Juliette is the embodiment of evil ~ . Her adventures ~ involve such august personages as Pope Pius VI ( who is unable to obtain her favors until after he performs a black mass in St. Peter's), the English aristocrat Lady Clarwil, the minister Saint Fond, Queen Caroline and King Ferdinand of Naples, and a cast of characters, both major and minor, which has no parallel in literature. For about a year after its original publication at the end of the eighteenth century, this immense work was freely sold in the major bookstores of Paris. But then it was seized, and any bookseller dealing with the infamous work was vigorously prosecuted. For a century and a half thereafter the work was proscribed, though it was circulated clandestinely, in private editions, to a privileged few. In 1949, more than a hundred and fifty years after its original publication, a daring French publisher issued a new edition, limited to 475 copies. Predictably, the publisher was prosecuted and, eventually, convicted of "outrage to public morals"~ which is precisely the effect that Sade the revolutionary intended. In his essay, reprinted in that 1949 edition, Guillaume Apollinaire declared that Sade was "the freest spirit that ever lived," and remarked that, on the subject of woman, Sade had ideas of his own: "He wanted her to be as free as man. Out of these ideas . grew a dual novel: Justine and Juliette. It was not by accident the Marquis chose heroines and not heroes. Justine is woman as she has formerly been, enslaved, miserable, and less than human; her opposite, Juliette, represents the woman whose advent he anticipated, a being of whom minds have as yet no conception, who is arising out of humanity, who shall have wings and who shall renew the world." Readers of Juliette may be taken aback by what they read: shocked, offended, scandalized. They should remember that, as French critic Maurice Blanchot once pointed out, ''this is a work beyond which no other writer, at any time, has ever managed to venture; we have, so to speak, a veritable absolute in our hands, in this relative world of letters."