First edition.
Bound in red half Russia with corners, spine with four raised bands gilt-ruled and decorated with double gilt panels, date in gilt at foot within a compartment, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, rare wrappers and spine preserved, top edge gilt, uncut, binding signed by Bernasconi.
The catalogue leaf of Victor Hugo’s works is present. A few folding creases to some leaves.
Mounted opposite the definitive version printed on p. 223 is a precious autograph poem by Victor Hugo, entitled “La pauvre fleur disait au papillon céleste”, on two folded leaves mounted on a stub. This is a first version, consisting of four quatrains. These verses were reworked by Hugo, with some variants, in the definitive version, augmented with four additional quatrains.
The poem was composed by Hugo for his mistress Juliette Drouet, whom he had met two years earlier. It symbolizes the nature of their relationship—the poet bound by his marital and literary life, the young woman condemned to wait for him—and played a central role in their shared imagination: Juliette Drouet frequently quoted the line “Et moi je reste seule à voir tourner mon ombre / À mes pieds !” in her love letters to Victor Hugo. The double motif of the flower and the butterfly, alongside their entwined initials, also appears in the painted decoration of the Chinese salon from Hauteville Fairy, Juliette Drouet’s residence in Guernsey, a décor conceived by Hugo himself and now preserved at the Maison Victor Hugo in Paris.
A fine uncut copy, in a charming signed binding, enriched with a very rare autograph poem by Victor Hugo written for Juliette Drouet.
