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Charles BAUDELAIRE & Victor HUGO

Théophile Gautier. Notice littéraire précédée d'une lettre de Victor Hugo

Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, Paris 1859, 11,5x18cm, relié.

Théophile Gautier. Notice littéraire précédée d'une lettre de Victor Hugo

First edition, one of 500 copies. Portrait of Théophile Gautier etched by Emile Thérond on the frontispiece.
Important preface-letter by Victor Hugo.
Bound in red morocco, gilt date at the foot of spine, marbled endpapers, Baudelairian ex-libris from Renée Cortot's collection pasted on the first flyleaf, wrappers preserved, top edge gilt.
Pale foxing affecting the first and last leaves, beautiful copy perfectly set.
 

Rare signed and inscribed copy by Charles Baudelaire: “ à mon ami Paul Meurice. Ch. Baudelaire. ” (“To my friend Paul Meurice. Ch. Baudelaire.”)
This exceptional autograph inscription to Paul Meurice, a real brother to Victor Hugo, bears witness to a unique literary meeting between two of the most important French poets, Hugo and Baudelaire.
 Paul Meurice was indeed the essential intermediary between the condemned poet and his illustrious exiled peer, since asking Victor Hugo to combine their names in this Théophile Gautier elegy was one Charles Baudelaire's most daring acts and would, no doubt, not have happened without Paul Meurice's precious support.
Paul Meurice, Dumas' ghost-writer, author of Fanfan la Tulipe and theatre adaptations of Victor Hugo, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas and Théophile Gautier, was a talented writer sadly shadowed by the great artists of his time. His unique relationship with Victor Hugo, however, gave him a decisive role in literary history. More than a friend, alongside Auguste Vacquerie, Paul replaced Victor Hugo's deceased brothers: “I lost my two brothers; him and you, you and him, you replace them; only I was the youngest; I became the eldest, that's the only difference.” It is to this brother at heart (whose marriage he witnessed alongside Ingres and Dumas) that Hugo entrusted his literary and financial interests. Hugo also appointed him, along with Auguste Vacquerie, as executor of his will.
After the poet's death, Meurice founded the Maison Victor Hugo, which is still today one of the writer's most famous residences.

In 1859, Paul's house then became Victor Hugo's Parisian antechamber, and so naturally Baudelaire went to speak to this official ambassador. The two did not know each other well but they had a mutual friend, Théophile Gautier, with whom Meurice had worked since 1842 on an adaptation of Falstaff. Consequently, he was the ideal intermediary to guarantee Hugo's participation.
Baudelaire had, however, already briefly met Victor Hugo. At the age of 19 he had asked for an interview with the poet he had worshiped since childhood:

“I love you as one loves a hero, a book, as one loves everything beautiful purely and without interest.” He already dreamed of himself as a worthy successor, as he tacitly confessed to him: “at nineteen years old would you have hesitated over writing as much to [...] Chateaubriand for example?”

For the young aspiring poet, Victor Hugo belonged to the past and Baudelaire quickly decided to free himself of his influence.
From his very first first work, Le Salon de 1845, the iconoclast Baudelaire criticized his old idol by declaring the end of Romanticism, of which Hugo is the absolute representative: “These are the last ancient ruins of romanticism [...] It is Mr Victor Hugo who lost Boulanger - after having lost so many others – It is the poet who caused the painter to fall into the pit.”
One year later, in Le Salon de 1846 he reiterated his attack even more fiercely, removing the Romantic master from his throne:
“because if my definition of romanticism (intimacy, spirituality, etc.) puts Delacroix at the head of romanticism, it naturally excludes Mr Victor Hugo. [...] Mr Victor Hugo, whose nobility and majesty I certainly do not want to diminish, is a much more skilful rather than inventive worker, a much more correct rather than creative worker. [...] Overly material, overly attentive to nature's appearance, Mr Victor Hugo has become a painter in poetry.”
 The murder of his poetic father-figure could not be fully committed without a substitute influence to replace him. It is Théophile Gautier who will serve as the new model for the young generation, whereas Victor Hugo, during his future exile, no longer published anything other than political writings for almost ten years. So, when Baudelaire addressed a copy of his Fleurs du Mal to Victor Hugo, he knew that he was inflicting on him this terrible dedication printed at the top “To the impeccable poet to the perfect magician of French letters to my very dear and very revered master and friend Théophile Gautier.” The young poet's animosity could not have escaped Victor Hugo. And no doubt Baudelaire did not expect this bright answer from Victor Hugo: “Your Fleurs du Mal radiate and dazzle like the stars.”
 With his article on Théophile Gautier published in L'Artiste on 13 March 1859, Baudelaire always pursues the same goal: to turn the “Victor Hugo” page of the history of French literature.
More skillful and more respectful than his previous writing:
“Our neighbours talk of Shakespeare and Gœthe, we can respond to them with Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier!”, Baudelaire's prose is intended to be clear and definitive: Hugo is dead, long live Gautier, “this writer the universe will envy us, as it envies us Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Balzac.”
The critics saw clearly through Baudelaire's attempts and the article was badly received. Baudelaire then had the crazy idea of involving Victor Hugo himself in the sullying of his own name: by publishing this very essay under their two names, a manifesto announcing a new poetic era.
By his own admission, the impertinent poet had already “committed this tremendous impropriety [of sending his article to Victor Hugo on] paper printed without enclosing a letter, a given tribute, a testimony of respect and loyalty.” There is no doubt that Baudelaire wanted to deliver a blow to his former mentor. The matter would certainly have persisted without Paul Meurice's intervention. He informed the hot-headed poet of Hugo's benevolent appreciation which he voiced in an undoubtedly kind, but definitively lost letter.
 
Learning this, Baudelaire in turn wrote an incredibly audacious and sincere letter to Victor Hugo:
“Sir, I greatly need you, and I invoke your kindness. Several months ago, I wrote a fairly long article about my friend Théophile Gautier which caused such laughter amongst fools that I saw it fit to make it into a little brochure, if only to prove that I never repent. - I requested the people at the newspaper send you a copy. I do not know if you have received it; but I learnt from our mutual friend M. Paul Meurice, that you were good enough to write me a letter, which has not yet been found.”
He plainly reveals his intentions, denying neither the impertinence of his article, nor the profound reason for his request:
“I especially wanted to bring the reader's thought back to this marvelous literary era of which you were the true king and which lives in my mind as a delicious memory of childhood. [...] I need you. I need a louder voice than mine or Théophile Gautier's, - your dictatorial voice. I want to be protected. I will humbly print what you deign to write me. Don't be shy, I beg you. If you find something to blame in these proofs, know that I will show your condemnation obediently, but without too much shame. Your criticism, is it not yet a caress, because it is an honour?”
He did not spare even Gautier, “whose name served as a pretext to my critical considerations, I can confess confidentially that I knew the shortcomings of his surprising mind.”
 Naturally, Baudelaire entrusts his “lourde missive” (hefty letter) to Paul Meurice. Expectiing a positive response he writes to his publisher “Hugo's letter will undoubtedly come Tuesday, and magnificent I believe it” (letter to Poulet-Malassis, 25 September 1859). Baudelaire takes particular care to highlight the prestigious writer of the preface, whose name appeared in print in the same font size as his own.
However, Hugo's letter is slow to arrive and it is again to Meurice that Baudelaire complains: “It is obvious that if any reason prevented M. Hugo from meeting my request, he would have let me know. I must then assume an accident.” (Letter to Paul Meurice on 5 October 1859). Indeed, Victor Hugo had sent his preface-letter, delivered shortly after. Baudelaire printed it in full at the beginning of his essay on Théophile Gautier.
 It was not, however, a simple preface, but a real response, written with all of Hugo masterful elegance. Hugo proved dissatisfied with the heavy attributes that Baudelaire gave him in the essay: “Victor Hugo, great, terrible, vast like a legendary creation, cyclopean, so to speak, represents the enormous forces of nature and their harmonious struggle.”
 
 To Baudelaire's own definition of poetry in this essay:

“Thus the principle of poetry is, strictly and simply, human aspiration towards a superior Beauty. [...] If the poet pursues a moral goal, he diminishes his poetic force (..) Poetry can not, under pain of death or decline, fit in with science or morality; it does not have the Truth as its object, it only has Itself.”

 
Hugo opposes his own precepts:

“You are not mistaken in foreseeing some dissidence between you and me. I never said Art for the sake of Art; I always said Art for the sake of Progress. [...] The poet can not go alone, he needs man also to travel. The footsteps of humanity are therefore the same as the footsteps of Art.”

 
With all due respect to Baudelaire, the writer that he confined in the “delicious memories of childhood” is far from having completed his vast work. It is in this little essay by one of his fierce adversaries, that Hugo announces the path of his future writings: La Légende des siècles, published this same month, and three years later, Les Misérables, the most important social and humanist saga in world literature.
 
Baudelaire gifted inscribed copies of his Gautier essay to artists he admired including Flaubert, Manet and Leconte de Lisle, proof of the importance he granted to his manifesto on aesthetics. Despite his valuable collaboration, Victor Hugo received a letter of thanks but no association copy of “their” pamphlet. However, a recent study in black light on a Baudelaire-inscribed copy made it possible to detect a scratched-out inscription intended to Hugo, “in testimony of admiration”, which Baudelaire then covered with a palimpsest inscription to Mr Gélis. This change of heart is symbolic of the love-hate relationship the two poets maintained throughout their lives.
Therefore, it is through this copy offered to “his friend Paul Meurice” Baudelaire ultimately choses to thank the Hugo clan for this exceptional literary meeting.
 Baudelaire and Hugo's Théophile Gautier is therefore, under his apparent modest nature, a double manifesto of the two great genius poets: L'Albatros by Baudelaire, against Ultima verba by Hugo. While “the wings of the giants [of the first] prevent him from walking,” the second “remains forbidden, wanting to remain standing.”
And if only two remain, it will be these two here!
 We have added and bound together an autographed ex-dono note by Victor Hugo to Paul Meurice. This note, no doubt never used, had however been prepared by Victor Hugo with several others, to offer his friend Meurice a copy of his works published in Paris during his exile. Although history did not allow Hugo to gift this work to Meurice, this presentation note that had remained unused, could not, in our opinion, be more justly united.
 
Provenance: Paul Meurice, then Alfred and Renée Cortot.
 

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