Pirates at Play by Violet Trefusis (Presentation Copy)
TREFUSIS, Violet. Pirates at Play. London: Michael Joseph, 1950.
Third impression. In attractive dust jacket illustrated by Philippe Jullian.
Presentation copy, inscribed in French by the author to her friend, Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac: ‘Pour Marie Blanche, ces Borgia bourgeois, son amie, Violette’.
Violet Trefusis (1894-1972) was a writer and a patron of the arts. She wrote novels (five in English, four in French), poems, essays, and plays. She is one of a handful of English authors who have written equally elegantly in English and in French. Pirates at Play, Violet’s final novel in English, is the story of a band of handsome Florentines on the lookout for rich mistresses.
Violet was the daughter of Alice Frederica Keppel, mistress of King Edward VII, and great-grandmother of Queen Camilla. During her life Violet had a number of affairs with remarkable women, such as the writer Vita Sackville-West and Princesse Winnaretta de Polignac (née Singer).
Violet and Marie-Blanche met In Paris through Winnaretta de Polignac (1865-1943) around 1923-4, when Winnaretta began a tumultuous ten-year love affair with Violet, and Marie-Blanche married Winnaretta’s nephew and close confidant, Comte Jean de Polignac. Winnaretta was the heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, and Belle Époque’s most influential musical patrons, her Parisian salon attracting musicians such as Gabriel Fauré, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, George Enescu, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel, Manuel De Falla, Clara Haskil, Arthur Rubinstein, Dinu Lipatti and Nadia Boulanger.
Marie-Blanche (born Marguerite di Pietro; 1897-1958) was the daughter of the couturiere Jeanne Lanvin. She was a gifted pianist and soprano, sought after by Satie and Poulenc, to perform their music. Marie-Blanche’s musical life flourished in her aunt's Winnaretta’s salon, eventually leading to performances on international concert stages with the Nadia Boulanger Ensemble. Among the Ensemble’s most successful pieces were the Monteverdi Madrigals, with Marie-Blanche singing “Lamento della ninfa”. In 1937 the Boulanger Ensemble recorded the Monteverdi Madrigals for commercial release on HMV’s Red Label series. The album proved an instant success, and in the long run proved to be of immense importance in arousing public interest in early music.
8vo, original cloth. 232 pp. Old faint stain to bottom of boards, pastedowns, and inside the dust jacket (slight edge-wear; 2 small tape repairs to inside dust jacket; spine lightly browned; in clear, removable protective sleeve). A good but still very attractive copy.