Contes Choisis de Daudet, Scribners, Pressed Flowers, c. 1919–1931

The Piece

A school edition of Alphonse Daudet, published by Charles Scribner's Sons and edited by James F. Broussard of the United States Naval Academy. The full title page reads Contes Choisis de Daudet, with Grammar Reviews and Exercises. Red linen cloth over boards, stamped in gilt with a triple rule border, the title, the editor, the publisher, and a lamp of learning at the center. The spine carries the title, the editor and the Scribners imprint in gilt.

A photogravure portrait of Daudet faces the title page, with his signature reproduced beneath it in facsimile. The dedication is Broussard's own, and it is worth reading: A ma mere qui m'a appris a parler la douce langue de France. To my mother, who taught me to speak the sweet language of France.

The front free endpaper is signed in ink, Laurie Hawley, with the class year 31 beneath it. A student carried this book, and dated it.

Then there is the thing that makes this copy particular. Pressed into the gutter at page 67 are two small dried flower buds on their stems, long enough in place that the paper has stained brown around them. They sit in section four of Daudet's story Les Vieux, on the page where the narrator sits in a quiet room that smells of old things, looking at two small beds side by side, while an elderly couple bring out a jar of brandied cherries they have kept for ten years waiting for a grandson who does not come.

Someone put flowers in that story and closed the book.

History & Provenance

Alphonse Daudet published Les Vieux in Le Figaro on October 23, 1868, and collected it the following year in Lettres de mon moulin, the book of Provencal sketches that remains his best known work. The story is a short one about a miller who travels to Eyguieres at a friend's request to visit grandparents the friend has not seen in a decade, and who finds himself inventing a life for the absent grandson because the truth would disappoint them. It is funny and then quietly devastating, which is Daudet working at his best.

James F. Broussard prepared this edition for American students, pairing the French text with English grammar notes, vocabulary and exercises on the facing pages. He taught at the United States Naval Academy and wrote other French language texts in the same period, among them Elements of French Pronunciation. Scribners held the copyright from 1919.

The copyright page carries the line Printed in the United States of America followed by the letter F, a Scribner Press impression mark, and the Scribner Press device appears at the foot of the page. The letter indicates this is not the first impression of the 1919 setting. The inscribed class year of 31 fixes the far end: the book was in a student's hands by 1931 at the latest. That gives a printing somewhere inside 1919 to 1931.

What survives here is an ordinary object that became a personal one. It left Scribners as a classroom text, went to a student who wrote a name and a year in the front, and at some point someone opened it to a story about old people keeping something for years and pressed two flowers into the fold.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Most old schoolbooks are interchangeable. This one is not, because two people left evidence in it and neither of them meant to. A student signed the front and dated it. Someone pressed flowers into a story about waiting, and the paper kept the stain.

The binding still reads well on a shelf. Red cloth, gilt rules, a lamp stamped at the center, the kind of sober decoration American publishers gave textbooks when a textbook was expected to last. The spine lettering is bright and legible across a room.

It suits a shelf of French books, a desk, a reading room, or anywhere a small object with a story in it earns more attention than a larger one without. For anyone who studied French, taught it, or simply likes finding that a book was lived in, this is a hundred year old paper trail of two small human gestures, still where they were left.