Cinq années de ma vie, 1894-1899 [Five Years of My Life], by Alfred Dreyfus. Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1901. French.
Memoirs of Alfred Dreyfus recounting his imprisonment in the penal colony of Devil’s Island, edited from his private diaries and published in 1901. On the margins of the first leaf is an autograph inscription by the author: "à Mr. Sletten, en souvenir sympathique, A. Dreyfus".
The present copy was apparently inscribed to Thorvald Sletten – a young Norwegian man accused of murdering his adoptive mother, convicted on scant evidence and sentenced to life imprisonment. Much like the Dreyfus Affair, Sletten’s incarceration provoked a public and press uproar in Norway; dozens of articles, books, pamphlets, and poems asserting his innocence were published by leading Norwegian writers, including Nobel laureate Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson. The case was frequently compared to Dreyfus’s conviction, and in 1900 a long poem titled Den norske Dreyfus (“The Norwegian Dreyfus”) was published, a sobriquet that thereafter adhered to Sletten (the poem appeared anonymously and is today attributed to Rudolf Muus). Following sustained public pressure and a prolonged campaign, Sletten was granted a pardon in 1907 and released after six years of imprisonment.
360 pages. Approx. 22.5 cm. Good condition. Light staining. Several unopened leaves. Binding with leather spine and gilt stamping over the original cover.
