Ailing Literature

Autograph manuscript by Louis Pasteur. One page in black ink on a single leaf, with numerous erased words and crossed-out passages.

Unpublished note by Pasteur on his rabies vaccine.

Pasteur was under the scrutiny of countless of opponents, scientific as well as political, and bemoans the "attacks as violent as they were incomprehensible" he endured. The manuscript also announces the popular success of his vaccine, as subscriptions for his future Institute were in full swing.

Second edition, largely original, as it is considerably expanded (cf. Caillet 2273).

This edition is not cited by Quérard. Not in Blake. NUC: 3 copies.

Rare copy preserved in its original pink wrappers with printed spine label, untrimmed; covers slightly worn with a few corner losses, spine splitting at foot.

The first edition, published anonymously and without publisher’s address, appeared in 1784 [i.e. 1785].

"C'est dans cet ouvrage que le marquis de Puységur fit connaître la découverte qu'il venait de faire (mai 1784) des phénomènes qu'il désigna sous le nom de somnambulisme artificiel. Plusieurs cures importantes minutieusement observées et dûment certifiées, sont relatées dans ces Mémoires indispensables à consulter. L'arbre magnétisé qui fit tant de bruit a sa page historique. L'auteur, l'un des hommes les plus honorables et les plus bienfaisants de son temps, a sans doute émis sur certaines parties de la science en général des idées que celle-ci ne peut accepter aujourd'hui ; mais on ne peut lui refuser une connaissance réelle de ce que l'on savait alors de l'électricité, et personne n'a su mieux tirer parti des ressources offertes par le somnambulisme artificiel" [Caillet].

A good, uncut copy in its original wrappers.

Autograph note by François René de Chateaubriand, 12 lines in black ink on a bifolium, addressed to Madame Amédée de Duras, rejoicing in her improved health.
A tear with loss, due to the seal having been broken to facilitate reading the note.
"Mde de CH[ateaubriand]. me dit de vous répondre: si je meurs, madame, ce sera à vos pieds le matin. Non pas à midi, mais à trois heures et demie. Je me porte à merveille chez ma soeur. Que cela ne soit pas vous, mais mde de Lévis qui m'ait vu perdre ma longue barbe er mon mouchoir turc. Ne venez pas, vous ne devriez pas venir. Mde de Ch[ateaubriand] est inconsolable... "

"Mon cher Confrère,
Excusez si je ne vous écris jamais, mais j'ai les yeux si malades que la seule pensée d'écrire dix lignes me torture.
J'ai l'intention d'ailleurs de faire plus, et d'aller vous serrer la main dans le courant d'avril. Je veux aller voir Naples, et descendre jusqu'à la Sicile. Je serai heureux de vous dire toute la reconnaissance que je vous ai pour votre si cordiale confraternité.
Je me demande si vous avez reçu Yvette [souligné plusieurs fois]. Dans tous les cas j'en ai encore un exemplaire ici, je vous l'adresse en le recommandant car les employés des Postes sont plus que suspects. [...]"

"Mon cher ami,
Je ne vous ai pas écrit parce que j'ai les yeux de plus en plus malades et qu'il m'est interdit de m'en servir soit pour lire soit pour écrire. [...] (My dear friend, I have not written to you because my eyes are increasingly ill and I am forbidden to use them either for reading or writing. [...])
Mais comme je vois que vous supposez des causes inexpliquées à mon silence, j'ai voulu vous en dire moi-même la raison. Merci pour vos articles, mais je ne les ai pas lus et on ne me les a pas lus. Le dit secrétaire a dû s'épargner cette besogne. Je les fais chercher : et je vais me les faire traduire tout de suite. Voilà un des gros ennuis des yeux malades ; on ne me montre pas la moitié des choses. Je vous fais envoyer Mont-Oriol par le même courrier.
Excusez mon laconisme, mon cher Pica, et croyez à mes sentiments bien affectueux" (But as I see that you suppose unexplained causes for my silence, I wanted to tell you the reason myself. Thank you for your articles, but I have not read them and no one has read them to me. The said secretary must have spared himself this task. I am having them searched for: and I will have them translated to me immediately. There is one of the great annoyances of sick eyes; they don't show me half of things. I am having Mont-Oriol sent to you by the same post. Excuse my brevity, my dear Pica, and believe in my most affectionate sentiments).

"[Maurice de Fleury] entretient des relations étroites avec Émile Zola et Joris-Karl Huysmans, avec lesquels il correspond dans les années 1880-1890. Fervent admirateur de l'auteur des Rougon-Macquart, Fleury conseille Zola pour Le Docteur Pascal (1893) et confie son admiration dans un article du Figaro, en 1896. Très « à la mode » parmi les « intellectuels » (selon le mot de Victor Segalen), le jeune médecin figure également dans la liste des auteurs symbolistes - aux côtés de Paul Adam, Henri de Régnier et Gustave Kahn - dans un essai d'André Barre, en 1911" ("[Maurice de Fleury] maintains close relations with Émile Zola and Joris-Karl Huysmans, with whom he corresponds in the years 1880-1890. Fervent admirer of the author of the Rougon-Macquart, Fleury advises Zola for Le Docteur Pascal (1893) and confides his admiration in an article in Le Figaro, in 1896. Very 'fashionable' among the 'intellectuals' (according to Victor Segalen), the young physician also appears in the list of symbolist authors - alongside Paul Adam, Henri de Régnier and Gustave Kahn - in an essay by André Barre, in 1911") (Lola Kheyar Stibler)

Original autograph letter by the Marquis de Sade, consists of 27 lines of relatively tight handwriting. Most likely written to his wife, as evidenced by the letter's origin from Sade's family. The letter is physically composed of two glued pieces of paper. On the verso the Marquis wrote 19 lines and scrupulously crossed them out - a few words and letters are still quite visible.
Cited in Maurice Lever's biography, 'Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade', Paris, Fayard, 1991, p. 631.

Autograph letter dated and signed by Jacques Mesrine, dated Saturday September 22, 1976, 67 lines in blue ink on one page recto verso addressed to his love of the time, Jeanne Schneider, thanks to whom the manuscript of Instinct de mort was discreetly smuggled out of prison.
Jacques Mesrine, then incarcerated at Fleury-Mérogis prison and deprived of human warmth, is enthusiastic about all the visits he receives in the visiting room, thus dispelling the myth of the antisocial bandit devoid of human feelings: "And after that they'll say I'm a savage! No, quite the contrary, and people who have had contact with me want to see me again. This gave me immense pleasure and do you know what happened next... she's also going to ask to see you. Apparently I'm missed by the nurses 'mister smile' that's the secret."
He particularly appreciated the visit from the nurse at La Santé prison who would also be their wedding witness with Jeanne Schneider and whom he praises: "... an enormous surprise! You'll never guess who came to see me! My nurse from La Santé... yes my darling... that charming lady with white hair whom you had seen in the visiting room at La Santé and who is to be our witness at our wedding [...] She's an exceptional woman, a former military nurse and quite well-placed in the ministry. During my 2 and a half years at La Santé I considered her like a mother, this woman is so devoted it's unthinkable. Woe to anyone who would touch a single hair on her head."
Public enemy No. 1 takes the opportunity again to break this reputation as a bloodthirsty beast that sticks to him: "If journalists knew that all the nurses entered my cell alone and with complete confidence, we'd be far from the 'beast' and hostage-taking à la Buffet. Nurses have always been sacred to me. They are untouchable like quite a few other people, but those journalist faggots don't know that; because they're not in my thoughts and that's regrettable sometimes."
Jacques Mesrine the rebel is surprised to find himself appreciating his prison solitude: "Do you know that I'm beginning to like it here... What calm you know manou, my isolation, I bear it insofar as I have peace. In detention it's not proven that I would have it. It's my reactions I'm afraid of... and the mentality of so-called crooks is increasingly disgusting! [...] in my isolation, there's good and bad... but personally, I don't want to complain... because there's no reason to do so." and ends his letter with paternal considerations for his daughter who is not very assiduous at school and for whom he worries: "I'm going to find out if Sabrina has been regularly attending her classes... I hope so because if the opposite were the case... no mercy this time... But what worry this kid can represent and what powerlessness I have to control her being here!"
Rare and very fine letter from Jacques Mesrine overflowing with reverence for the nursing profession and regrettable detestation for that of journalists.

First edition, one of 80 numbered copies on Montval paper, ours unnumbered but properly justified with Montval at the foot of the spine and below the print run justification, deluxe copy.
Handsome full-margined copy.

“Yes I have sarcasm in my words, yes I do not know how to flatter and bend my back, how to beg in official salons […] I am nothing but a braying schemer, but if I had submitted - yes I would be comfortable."

Long autograph letter dated August 1896 and signed by Paul Gauguin to painter Daniel de Monfreid. Four pages in black ink on two lined sheets.
Small tears to margins not affecting the text, traces of folds inherent to sending.
In the midst of his descent into hell, abandoned in his Tahitian artificial paradise, Gauguin feels cursed : “Definitely, I was born under a bad star.”, he laments. His quest for primitive freedom leaves him in destitution and misery. Suffering agony, the painter sends paintings to one of his few supporters, his faithful friend Daniel de Monfreid - but writes the wrong address...
Published in Lettres de Paul Gauguin à Georges-Daniel de Monfreid, 1918, p. 146, n° XXIII; our letter reveals the name of Émile Schuffenecker, his friend and associate on the Paris stock exchange and then Pont-Aven - anonymized in the published version - whom Gauguin vilifies on numerous occasions in these pages.
This exceptional missive was written in Tahiti, where the painter had returned the previous year, bidding a final farewell to the old Europe. Gauguin had just come out from a stay in hospital in Papeete to treat his bruised legs following the beating he had received in Concarneau two years earlier for defending his muse, Annah the Javanese. The painter could not escape the aftermath of this altercation and suffered from a terrible purulent eczema on his leg, as well as syphilis, drowning his torments in alcohol. The letter is a perfect example of Gauguin's correspondence from the summer of 1896 which "smells of the fever that has seized a mind overheated by pain and lack of sleep" (David Haziot). In his confusion, the painter misspelt the address of Monfreid's studio at the Cité Fleurie, a famous chalet-like artists' residence where Gauguin had stayed : “I sent you a bunch of paintings last month. I'm afraid for them because it seems to me that I put 55 Bd Arago instead of 65” This mailing included his composition Eihaha Ohipa, painted in his studio in Punaauia and now kept at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Shipped via a naval officer - fees to be paid by Monfreid - the paintings did not arrive until November. Beyond his feverish fears, Gauguin delivers in these lines a true manifesto of his integrity as an artist - the perfect counterpart to his famous Christlike self-portrait Near Golgotha, painted around the same period. To him, his destiny and generosity are nothing short of Christ-like: “in the most difficult moments of my life, I more than shared with unfortunate people and never had any reward other than complete abandonment”. He had in fact helped display Schuffenecker's paintings in Impressionist exhibitions, saved his friend Laval from suicide and opened his purse to so many others. Instead of returning the favor, Schuffenecker prefers to feel sorry for himself: “Schuff really wrote me a crazy and unfair letter and I don't know what to answer because he is a sick mind [...] he would be more unhappy than me who has glory, strength and health. Let's talk about it! I'm good at making others jealous, he says”. Gauguin, who had always refused to make concessions and compromise, is finally betrayed by one of his closest relations, Schuffenecker, who becomes in the letter a true Judas Iscariot: “Schuff has just made a useless petition, I believe, for the State to come to my aid. This is the thing that can offend me the most. I'm asking friends to help me out for the time it takes to get back the money I'm owed, and their efforts to recover it, but begging the State was never my intention”. The painter reaches a point of no return, not only bruised in his flesh, but also in his self-esteem: “All my efforts to fight outside the official arena, the dignity I have strived for all my life, are now losing their character. From this day I am nothing but a braying schemer, but if I had submitted - yes I would be comfortable. Really, this is a sorrow that I didn't intend to have. Definitely, I was born under a bad star.” After this final abandonment, Gauguin gave free rein to his artistic and sensual frenzy in his Maison du Jouir in the Marquesas.
Suffering and penniless, Gauguin proclaims his distress and shattered pride - a Nabi Christ abandoning his cross, ready to fall into lust and the intoxication of the paintbrush.

Autograph letter signed to Madame Catusse, 12,6x20,4cm, 3 pages on a double leaf.

Autograph letter signed by Marcel Proust, probably addressed to Madame Catusse. The recipient and date have been determined by Proust scholar Jean-Yves Tadié. Three pages in black ink on a double leaf edged in black. A fold inherent to the mailing.
A sombre and admirable letter steeped in Proustian melancholy. The future author of In Search of Lost Time feels more than ever the loss of his mother during the New Year period. The famously generous Proust also asks his faithful confidante Madame Catusse to buy a gift for the Straus couple, whose wife inspired the character of the Comtesse de Guermantes.

 
The end of 1907, apparent date of this letter alluding to the approaching New Year, marks the second holiday season spent without Madame Proust, who had died two years earlier: "New Year's Day is only an occasion for me - as if occasions were needed! -- to reminisce and weep". Proust had also expressed this sentiment in a letter to Anna de Noailles the year before ("New Year's Day had a terrible evocative power over me. It suddenly gave me back the memories of Maman that I had lost, the memory of her voice", February 1906). This fateful moment acted on Proust like a pernicious madeleine, at once a sensory reminiscence and an acute awareness of his loss. He would soon begin writing In Search of Lost Time to conjure up this mother figure whose absence would remain unbearable.

For the time being, Proust is busy writing a series of Pastiches for Le Figaro, "which were, in reality, only a penultimate detour before writing La Recherche" (George D. Painter). One of these Pastiches dealt with the swindle perpetrated on the president of De Beers in which Proust had invested. Imagining himself already ruined, he mentions these unfortunate circumstances in capital letters: "HAVE I REPORTED MY FINANCIAL DESASTERS TO YOU OVER THE TELEPHONE? ..." Overwhelmed by ailments, he is also plagued by one of his many asthma attacks "provoked or exasperated by these terrible fogs", forcing him into reclusion and even silence: "telephoning is very dangerous for me. And I'm also very tired when it comes to writing".

 
The recipient Mme Catusse was a friend of Proust's mother and became an invaluable support to the writer. Proust's prolific correspondence with the woman Ghislain de Diesbach had dubbed the writer's Notre-Dame-des-Corvées represents an inexhaustible resource of insights into his secret life and fears. Proust had called her in a panic during an aphasia attack suffered by his mother shortly before her death. As he became increasingly isolated after moving into 102 boulevard Haussmann the previous year, Proust sought her help in many matters, including the purchase of numerous gifts: "I would have liked to ask you if you had by any chance seen anything suitable for the Straus, although I always dislike coinciding with New Year's Day".

This sentiment would inspire a passage in The Captive castigating those same "New Year's Day presents" given to Madame Verdurin: "those singular and superfluous objects which still appear to have been just taken from the box in which they were offered and remain for ever what they were at first" (The Captive, C.K. Scott Moncrieff's Translation Edited and Annotated by William C. Carter, Yale University Press, 2023, p. 308). Known for his frenzied displays of prodigality, Proust overcomes his aversion to these occasional gifts. The smallest favor to the writer gave rise to extravagant expenses. Lawyer Emile Straus had probably helped the writer sort out his inheritance affairs: "I FEEL THAT THE NUMEROUS SERVICES PROVIDED TO ME BY MR. STRAUS CANNOT REMAIN WITHOUT THANKS, since I believe he would not accept a fee. If you happened to have seen something very pretty, in any genre, or any period, between 100 and 300 fr. I would gladly take it."

A precious demonstration of the "ever so strange and aggressive" Proustian generosity, making this letter a perfect demonstration of the link between friendship and money which would become a recurring theme throughout In Search of Lost Time.

Autograph letter signed in black ink, addressed to his mother and dated “Sunday morning the 14th.” A few underlinings, deletions and corrections by the author.
Formerly in the collection of Armand Godoy, n°188.
A fading Baudelaire: “The state of disgust in which I find myself makes everything seem even worse.”
Drawn by the promise of epic fame, Baudelaire went to Belgium in April 1864 for a few conferences and in the hope of a fruitful meeting with the publishers of Les Misérables, Lacroix and Verboeckhoven. The meeting didn't happen, the conferences were a failure and Baudelaire felt boundless resentment for “Poor Belgium”. Nonetheless, despite numerous calls to return to France, the poet would spend the rest of his days in this much-castigated country, living the life of a melancholic bohemian. Aside from a few short stays in Paris, Baudelaire, floored by a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side, would only return to France on 29 June 1866 for a final year of silent agony in a sanatorium.
Written barely a few months after his arrival in Brussels and his initial disappointments, this letter shows us all the principal elements of the mysterious and passionate hatred that would keep the poet definitively in Belgium.
In his final years in France, exhausted by the trial of The Flowers of Evil, humiliated by the failure of his candidacy to the Académie Française, a literary orphan after the bankruptcy of Poulet-Malassis and disinherited as an author by the sale of his translation rights to Michel Lévy, Baudelaire was above all deeply moved by the inevitable decline of Jeanne Duval, his enduring love, while his passion for la Présidente had dried up, her poetic perfection not having withstood the prosaic experience of physical possession. Thus, on 24 April 1864, he decided to flee these “decomposing loves”, of which he could keep only the “form and the divine essence.”
Belgium, so young as a country and seemingly born out of a Francophone Romantic revolution against the Dutch financial yoke, presented itself to the poet phantasmagorically as a place where his own modernity might be acknowledged. A blank page on which he wanted to stamp the power of his language while affirming his economic independence, Belgium was a mirror onto which Baudelaire projected his powerful ideal, but one that would send him tumbling even more violently into the spleen of his final disillusionment.
Published in the Revue de Paris in November 1917, without the sensitive passage about his cold enemas, this emblematic letter evokes all of Baudelaire's work as poet, writer, artist and pamphleteer. The first such reference is via the reassuring, mentor-like figure of the publisher of The Flowers of Evil, Poulet-Malassis: “If I was not so far from him, I really think I'd end up paying so I could take my meals at his.” This is followed by a specific reference to the “venal value” of his Aesthetic Curiosities: “all these articles that I so sadly wrote on painting and poetry” . Baudelaire then confides in his mother his hopes for his latest translations of Poe which, to his great frustration “are not getting published by L'Opinion, La Vie Parisienne, or in Le Monde illustré”. He concludes with his Belgian Letters, which Jules Hetzel had just told him had been, after negotiations with Le Figaro, “received with great pleasure.” Nonetheless, as Baudelaire literally underlined, they were “only to be published when I come back to France.”
His perennially imminent return to France is a leitmotiv of his Belgian correspondence: “Certainly, I think I'll go to Paris on Thursday.” It is nonetheless always put off (“I'm putting off going to Paris until the end of the month”, he corrects himself eight days later), and it seems to stoke up the poet's ferocity towards his new fellow citizens, Baudelaire taking pleasure in actively spreading the worst kinds of rumors about them (involving espionage, parricide, cannibalism, pederasty and other licentious activities. “Tired of always being believed, I put about the rumor that I had killed my father and eaten him... and they believed me! I'm swimming in disgrace like a fish through water.” “Poor Belgium”, in Œuvres complètes, II p. 855)
This eminently poetic attempt to explore the depths of despair in covering himself in hatred is perhaps most clearly seen through his sharing of his culinary difficulties with his “dear, dear mother”, the only sustaining figure who gave him “more than [he]'d expected”.
Read together with some of the finest pages of The Flowers of Evil, this excessive attention to the miseries of his palate reveal far more than simple culinary fussiness.
It is also hardly innocent that Baudelaire begins his recriminations with an exhaustive rejection of all food, with one notable exception: “Everything is bad, save for wine”. This assertion is clearly not without reference to the “vegetal ambrosia”, that sanctified elixir in so many of his poems and above all a friend in misery, which drowns out the poet's sublime crime. “None can understand me. Did one /Among all those stupid drunkards / Ever dream in his morbid nights / Of making a shroud of wine?”.
“Bread is bad”. If wine is the incorruptible soul of a poet, bread, here underlined by the author, is his innocent and mortal flesh. “In the bread and wine intended for their mouths / They mix ashes and impure spit”, as Baudelaire says in Benediction. This is the poet-child who everywhere, in hotels, restaurants, English taverns, “suffers from this impossible communion of elements and thus presents his mother with an even more symbolic vision of his misery”.
Nonetheless, the man is always present, his carnal desires hidden beneath the misery of his condition. “Meat is not bad in itself. It becomes bad in the manner of its cooking.” How can we not, behind the apparently prosaic nature of this culinary comment, recognize the most permanent of Baudelaire's metaphors, present throughout the poet's work – A Carcass, To She Who is Too Gay, A Martyr, Women Doomed – the female body transformed by death?
“The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,
And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined”
“People who live at home live less badly,” he continues, but Baudelaire doesn't want to be comforted and his complaining is nothing but an expression of the perfect correlations between his physical condition and this final poetical experience.
Of course, Belgium was not really to blame, but it was only to his mother that Baudelaire could make this rare and moving confession: “I must say, by the by, that the state of disgust in
which I find myself makes everything seem even worse.”
Essentially, all the aggression he was to pour out on these cursed kinspeople was nothing but the echo of an older rancor that, in 1863, consumed his “heart laid bare.” To his mother's recriminations at finding her son's notes, Baudelaire replied, on 5 June: “Well! Yes, this much-wished for book will be a book of recriminations...I will turn on the whole of France my very real talent for impertinence. I need revenge like a tired man needs his bath.”
The “cold laudanum enemas” of Belgium were to be that bath for the tired poet, who found an occasion to combat, with a supreme wrath, this existential “disgust”. In the middle of a paragraph – the very one that would be cut by the Revue Française – Baudelaire attributes this, without naming the disease, to syphilis: “What is insupportable in these intestinal and stomach complaints is the physical weakness and the spiritual sadness that result from them.”
Madame Aupick's immediate concern at these all too sudden confidences led Baudelaire to lie to her about his actual state of health, which continued to get worse. Hence, in his following letter: “It was terribly wrong of me to talk to you about my Belgian health, since it affected you so deeply...Generally speaking, I'm in excellent health...That I have a few little problems...so what? That is the general lot. As for my trouble, I can only repeat that I have seen other Frenchmen suffer the same way, being unable to adapt to this vicious climate...And in any case, I won't be staying long.”
A superb autograph letter from a son to his mother, subtly revealing the poetical reasons for his final self-imposed exile, the inverted mirror of the first, enforced, wandering of his youth in the Mascarene Islands, the writer's only two voyages.
If the young man could somehow – we don't know how – escape to the far-off Reunion island, the old man nonetheless didn't dare leave Belgium, which was so close, and this melancholic letter augured the end of his days spent by the North Sea, as somber as his initial trip to the South Seas had been bright.