Investigations

When the young Victor published his first collection of poems, he immediately sent a copy to the man who had transformed the "colourless, sightless and voiceless child" into a poet at the age of seven and, soon after, a literary monument. Edition-Originale has uncovered a unique trace of the existence of this mentor figure who haunts the work of Victor Hugo, Father La Rivière...

Who decided summertime idleness and leisurely musings were mindless activities? Curiosity is only a flaw if one has yet to indulge in it...

An investigation into the most emblematic image of the Resistance, made and spread... by Nazi propaganda. Thanks to the leaflet that accompanied it, discover what lies behind the renowned Affiche Rouge, as well as what even Aragon’s hymn left unspoken — for there were only 22 when the rifles fired...

"The book that revealed to the world the existence and horrors of the death camps"

The Directoire and Napoleonic eras had frivolousness in spades... French fashion’s greatest publisher Pierre de la Mésangère proved it brilliantly with his large format plates in Le Bon Genre — an encyclopedia of thrill, pleasure, and style, showcasing the colorful splendors and decadence of Parisian high society in full transformation at the turn of the century.

Investigation into the most precious of the 20 known copies of Jacques Lacan's thesis: “De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité”. Until now, the existence of this dedication was only assumed thanks to the response of its illustrious dedicatee: Sigmund Freud. Yet it remains the only direct interaction between the two founders of the science of psychoanalysis.

This week, the investigation presents the completely unpublished manuscript of a bourgeois from Reims who, in 1647, packed his bags for a seven-month adventure through France and Italy as a ‘tourist’. His daily journal is an extraordinary intellectual, cultural, social, political, gastronomic and onelogical testimony.

Ophelia owes her morbid languor to him; artists acknowledge in him the origin of the livre de peintre; it inspired even its author himself. Printed in just 80 copies, Delacroix’s Hamlet is not only among the artist’s finest works – it stands as a pinnacle of Romantic art. Le Feu Follet has uncovered one of the 20 deluxe copies printed on Chine paper.

"I experience spasms, a sort of shivering, a lot of yawning, disgust, total despondency, the blood rushes violently to my head, then I feel dizzy, spinning, which makes me stumble, and a thousand other things proving a great tension in the body, and a great irritation in the nervous system."