The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (Paperback)

The Crime Of Sylvestre Bonnard was Anatole France's first major success and helped to set the tone for many of his fiction works, which remained focused on the ironies and comedy surrounding literature and literary men. The novel is split into two parts, which share the protagonist and not much else. In the first, 'The Log', Sylvestre Bonnard is engaged in a series of events surrounding his acquisition of 'La Legende Doree de Jacques de Genes', a manuscript prized for its translation by Clerk Alexander, who is a personal hero of Bonnard's. With what surprise, with what emotion, with what anxiety did I therein discover the following mention, which I cannot even now copy without feeling my hand tremble: "LA LEGENDE DOREE DE JACQUES DE GENES (Jacques de Voragine);-- traduction francaise, petit in-4. " Bonnard travels from France to Sicily to find the manuscript, and then back again to France (to a shop a few streets away from his home), and finally to an auction house. Along the way he falls in with the Trepofs, a very rich couple who are traveling the world to collect matchbooks in an effort to stave away their "ennui." They have amassed several thousand already, as Madame Trepof tell him: "You know that my husband is making a collection of match-boxes. We bought thirteen hundred match-boxes at Marseilles. But we heard there was a factory of them at Girgenti...Dimitri has been a collector of all sorts of things; but the only kind of collection which can now interest him is a collection of match-boxes. He has already got five thousand two hundred and fourteen different kinds.