Orientale (L'aventure de Therese Beauchamps)

New York: Brentano's. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1929. 2nd printing. Hardcover. DETAILS NEEDED. (B&W sketches, decorations) "A boorish husband, a wife starved for love, and a lover out of the East, exotic, passionate, and chivalrous. Then Fate and a senseless betrayal. Who shall blame the downtrodden French bourgeois wife for preferring the most delicate of lovers to her hum-drum existence, especially since he proves to be a highly sensitive Mandarin of China? People may be shocked and perhaps dismayed by the intense love story that is complicated by a question of race feeling. Yet every one will be charmed by the manner and style of M. de Miomandre, who writes with French sophistication and clarity." The author had been a Prix Goncourt winner back in 1908, and is described in the jacket blurb as "one of the best known young writers in France today"; the blurb writer also intimates that the character of the unknown young author whose domestic life is discombobulated when he wins a literary prize, in Edouard Bourdet's 1927 play "Just Out" (French title "Vient de paraître"), was based on de Miomandre. (The play was filmed in France in 1949, with Pierre Fresnay in the lead.) Howzat for some useless trivia? .