No Tomorrow

Lydia Davis’s translation is equal to the challenges of Denon’s formal, elaborate prose, and there is little to choose between her version and the excellent one produced by David Coward in 1995… This elegant edition reproduces Denon’s original text, which remains, by common consent, a masterpiece. Times Literary Supplement A trip to pre-Revolutionary France, where one is comforted to encounter once more its aristocracy’s relaxed attitude to matters such as marital fidelity. Scottish Sunday Herald You can read No Tomorrow in just an hour. Its chiaroscuro effects of candlelight and shadow, its teasing tone, its picture of gradual unveiling and dishabille will keep you both charmed and on edge. Embrace the gradualness, the anticipation. There’s no need to rush. Guardian Weekly

Dominique Vivant Denon (1747-1825), a member of the minor French nobility, was born in Burgundy and sent to Paris to study law-a field he soon abandoned in order to pursue literature and art. After writing a play that enjoyed a small succcess, Denon became a favorite of Louis XV, who in 1769 put him in charge of Madame de Pompadour’s gemstone collection. Dispatched on various diplomatic missions to Russia and Sweden, Denon eventually joined the French embassy in Naples, where he spent seven years studying, etching, and collecting antiquities. The 1789 revolution put Denon’s life at serious risk, but he was protected by his friendship with the painter David, who employed him as a designer of costumes for revolutionary pageants. Denon allied himself to Napoleon and took part in the Egyptian campaign, making sketches of monuments that were later published in his Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt (1802), a book that helped to inspire the Egyptian Revival in the decorative arts. In 1804 Napoleon made Denon the director-general of museums and the head of the Musee Napoleon, and it was Denon who oversaw the assembly of the extraordinary collection, drawn by the Emperor’s armies from all over Europe, that remains central to today’s Louvre. Forced into retirement after Napoleon’s downfall, Denon turned to assembling an illustrated history of art, left unfinished at the time of his death but published posthumously.

Peter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.

Lydia Davis is an American author and translator of French. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University at Albany, SUNY.

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