BARBEY D’AUREVILLY, Jules-Amédée. What Never Dies. A Romance. Translated into English by Sebastian Melmoth (O.W.).

Paris: Privately Printed, 1902. Crown octavo, pp. 360. First English edition. Bound in richly gilt crimson crushed levant morocco, covers framed by double gilt fillets and leafy corner ornaments, large panel in centre with interlacing laurel-wreath tools forming a geometric lattice with tiny green onlays; spine elaborately tooled, gilt dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Pictorial bookplate of John Whiting and Helen Ottillie Friel on front pastedown. A bright, handsome copy in a magnificent binding.
First English edition of Ce qui ne Meurt Pas (1836), Barbey’s passionate and scandalous romance. Barbey d’Aurevilly (1808-1889), a critic, Catholic polemicist, and stylist much admired by Baudelaire, became a cult figure for the Decadent generation. Oscar Wilde, exiled in Paris and writing under the name ‘Sebastian Melmoth,’ undertook this translation late in his life. His choice of Barbey was significant: both were writers of paradox, Catholic sensibility, and sensual excess, concerned with the entanglements of faith, sin, and desire.
The translation was printed privately in Paris in 1902, three years after Wilde’s death, and circulated only among intimates and collectors. Its bibliographical rarity is compounded by its literary significance as the last major work Wilde translated, aligning him with one of the most controversial French stylists of the nineteenth century.
An important Wildeana item, scarce in commerce, and here presented in a binding of distinction.

The book nevertheless has a long-established place in Wilde collecting precisely because of the “Sebastian Melmoth (O.W.)” attribution. Copies of the 1902 edition have appeared in significant Wilde collections and the title remains an intriguing example of the publishing and bibliographical complications surrounding Wilde in the years immediately following his death.

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