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First edition, first impression, an appealing presentation copy, warmly inscribed on the half-title by the editor Guillaume-Stanislas Trébutien to Captain William Jesse, Brummell's first biographer, both correspondents of the author. This is one of the few copies printed on pink paper of this influential essay inaugurating the French dandyist movement, attractively bound. After serving for a few years in the army as captain of the Prince of Wales's personal regiment, George "Beau" Brummell (1778-1849) retired and moved to London, soon establishing himself as the leading exponent and arbiter of the fashion for dandyism. No longer on good terms with the prince after an incident at a masquerade ball and struggling financially because of gambling debts, Brummell fled to France, in the provincial town of Caen, where he remained for the rest of his life. Here, Brummell became as famous as he was in England, prompting Count Barbey d'Aurevilly, a Norman man of letters and a philosopher, to write the present work. D'Aurevilly never met Brummell in person. A celebrated dandy himself, he became obsessed with Brummell's life after he got into contact - through the intermediary of his close friend Trébutien, a scholar of Caen - with Captain Jesse, and read his Life of George Brummell before publication. Jesse had met Brummell at a social event in Caen in 1832 and subsequently gathered information about him from his friends in this town and in Calais. D'Aurevilly's work, based on Jesse's accounts of Brummell related to him by Trébutien, "moved dandyism away from its British, novelistic roots toward its later French life as an aesthetic and philosophical movement. Du Dandysme provided the cornerstone for all of the dandyist tradition that followed it, influencing Baudelaire, Huysmans, and the re-emergent British dandies of the late Victorian period" (Garelick, p. 9). It has been estimated that 320 copies of this edition were printed, primarily for circulation among Brummell's friends in Caen (Bibliographie des écrivains français 22, Barbey d'Aurevilly, n° 246). Of the copies traced, the minority are on coloured paper, and bibliographers have suggested that as few as twenty were printed thus; only three copies on pink paper are recorded at auction. A wider publication followed in 1861 in Paris. READ MORE Octavo (173 x 129 mm). Contemporary green calf, flat spine lettered in gilt, elaborate blind and gilt borders to covers, board edges, and turn-ins, marbled endpapers and edges. With front cover of original blue paper wrappers bound in. Main text printed on pink paper, with the errata leaf at rear. Extremities a little rubbed, spine and board edges faded to brown, light scuffs and couple of faint damp stains to covers, small paper residue at gutter of original front wrapper, light foxing and minor damp staining to verso, margins of contents gently faded, a couple of small spots of scuffing to rear pastedown. A very good, wide-margined and clean copy, presenting attractively in the binding. Vicaire I, p. 290; Marie Françoise Melmoux-Montaubin, Bibliographie des écrivains français 22, Barbey d'Aurevilly, 2001, n° 246. Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle, 2021.