Coup de Grace.

YOURCENAR, Marguerite.

Item Number: 110284

New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1957.

First edition of this classic work by the author of Memoirs of Hadrian. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “a Mrs. Charles Thompson hommage amical, Marguerite Yourcenar.” Also signed by the translator, “And greetings from Grace Frick.” Near fine in a near fine dust jacket, bookplate to the front pastedown, ownership inscription. Jacket design by Seymour Chwast. Translated by Grace Frick.

Set in the Baltic provinces in the aftermath of World War I, Coup de Grace tells the story of an intimacy that grows between three young people hemmed in by civil war: Erick, a Prussian fighting with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks; Conrad, his best friend from childhood; and Sophie, whose unrequited love for Conrad becomes an unbearable burden. “The eerie effect of [Yourcenar's] prose . . . is all the more extraordinary in that she was not present in Lithuania in the years immediately following World War I. Her accomplishment is like that of Stephen Crane in The Red Badge of Courage or Stendahl's in the Waterloo chapters of The Charterhouse of Parma" (Louis Auchincloss, The New York Times Book Review). It was the basis for the 1976 film Coup de Grâce, directed by Volker Schlöndorff.