305 - THE TOWN OF MIRMONT (Jean de). *Les Dimanches de Jean Dézert*. Paris, J. Bergue, 1914. In-12, 127-[1] pp., 1 folio, paperback, printed gray cover. Printed portrait of the author, pasted onto the half-title page. A few pinholes.

THE TOWN OF MIRMONT (Jean de). *Les Dimanches de Jean Dézert*. Paris, J. Bergue, 1914. In-12, 127-[1] pp., 1 folio, paperback, printed gray cover. Printed portrait of the author, pasted onto the half-title page. A few pinholes. A rare first edition, printed in a run of only 305 copies (no. 182), of the only book published during the lifetime of Jean de La Ville de Mirmont (1886–1914), a young writer from Bordeaux and friend of François Mauriac, who died at the front on November 28, 1914, a few months after its publication. This short novel, astonishingly modern, depicts with disillusioned irony the loneliness and boredom of a modest Parisian civil servant, whose Sundays—far from offering an escape—reveal the sheer absurdity of existence. A unique work, blending black humor, melancholy, and a critique of bourgeois mediocrity, it is now considered a minor masterpiece of early 20th-century literature.