Le Protégé

FIRST EDITION. One of 25 numbered copies on Lafuma-Navarre pure rag vellum, the only large-paper issue.

The hero of this book has the singular privilege of indefinitely retaining the feverish delusions of his childhood mind. He wants to do nothing but roam the countryside, to keep this primary right which adults pompously renounce, and which is the truant school of imagination. His singularity is to exist outside of time, deprived of a freedom that signifies events, accidents, constraints, sufferings, a succession of chances. An incessant panic, an eternal childhood terror, threatens him. It is the attack of monsters one has not read and dreamed with impunity.