Service Inutile.

8vo. Original paper covers with glassine wrapper. Uncut. Wrappers worn and frayed with slight loss at head and tail of spine. Paper browned. With a presentation inscription from Montherlant to the 21 year old Pierre (Peter) Gimpel, dated 29 january 1936.Pierre Gimpel (Peter Gimpel), art dealer: born Paris 26 October 1915; died London 12 June 2005.Art dealers are essentially intermediaries between artists and the buying public, but a few genuinely help shape the taste of a generation. Peter Gimpel was one such. With his brother Charles, he set up Gimpel Fils in London in 1946, first in South Molton Street, W1, then around the corner in much larger premises in Davies Street. No gallery did as much, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, to put contemporary British artists, notably those of the St Ives school, the abstract painters of the Ecole de Paris and, to a lesser extent, rising American painters on the map.They called themselves Gimpel Fils in homage to their father René, himself a second generation art dealer of Alsatian Jewish origin, who was not merely a dealer in the Duveen class (and considerably more of an expert than Joe Duveen), but was married to the youngest of the 13 Duveen siblings. René Gimpel was also a peerless diarist, whose Journal d'un Collectionneur, first published in 1963 and subsequently in translation as The Diary of an Art Dealer, wittily chronicled his friendship with the likes of Monet, Renoir, Forain and Proust, as well as his dealings with difficult American mega-collectors like Henry Clay Frick. After the German occupation of France he joined the Resistance, aged over 60, and died in Neuengamme concentration camp in 1944. Charles, who had been captured working for the same cause, was subsequently tortured. The youngest son, Jean, also in the Resistance, evaded capture. Peter joined the British Army.The three Gimpel sons - Jean went into diamonds and became an authority on medieval technology - had been brought up in highly cultured luxury in a house in the Bois de Boulogne, on the west side of Paris, with some 15 servants. Charles and Peter (then called Ernest and Pierre - "Charles" was Ernest's Resistance codename, which he adopted permanently) were painted by Marie Laurençin aged seven and five respectively.Peter was sent off in his teens to a smart boarding school in Switzerland, Le Rosey, which he loathed, and then conscripted into the French army. He and Charles did their military service in North Africa as troopers in the turbaned chasseurs d'Afrique, both being much concerned with what Peter described as "the personal hygiene and beautification of the horse".After the outbreak of the Second World War, Charles hurried back to France from London, where he had begun to work for a firm of decorators, to join a French tank regiment. Both were bilingual: Peter was soon made a liaison officer with the 51st Highland Division and fought with them during the German breakthrough. Both brothers were evacuated via Dunkirk. Peter was given a commission in the 60th Rifles, fought in the battle of El Alamein from the first day, survived the Italian campaign and ended up in a small unit 100 miles inside Germany.Gimpel Fils opened sensationally - if misleadingly, given the gallery's contemporary mission - in November 1946 with a show entitled "Five Centuries of French Painting", drawn from the small part of their father's collection that had been removed to safety in England before the Second World War. (While René knew and collected the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, he had specialised in 18th-century French painting, and was an expert on Vermeer. The bulk of his stock was lost in Paris during the war.) The proceeds from this exhibition, and from other works subsequently trickled onto the market, helped fund the gallery's commitment to contemporary art, and British art in particular.Among artists with whom Gimpel Fils came to be closely associated were: from Britain, the sculptors Barbara Hepworth.…