Exceptional Autographs

First edition on ordinary paper.
Small spots, not serious, to head of the covers and the endpaper.
Handsome autograph inscription signed by Jean Cocteau to his friend Francis Poulenc : "A Francis Poulenc qui est musique son Jean."

Autograph letter signed by Charles Baudelaire, written in ink and addressed to his mother. A few underlinings, deletions, and authorial corrections.
This letter was first published in Charles Baudelaire, Dernières lettres inédites à sa mère in 1926.
Former collection of Armand Godoy, no. 197.

A precious letter from Baudelaire's Brussels period, during the poet's voluntary exile at the end of his life.

« Il est douteux que j'habite quelque part à Paris. Je crois que j'habiterai surtout une voiture dans laquelle je ferai, si je peux, toutes mes courses en un ou deux jours. » Haunted by Paris – the city of vice and creditors – he dreads this brief return. His exile in Brussels is, in his eyes, a sign of failure, and ever since arriving in Belgium he has delayed his return to France. Yet weary of the flat country he despises, he mocks its inhabitants: « On est lent ici. »

The poet, like the seventeen-year-old student who once promised his mother he would get back on track, now vows: « Me voici en mesure d'accomplir tous mes plans. Je ne sais comment t'exprimer ma reconnaissance ; et je crois que la meilleure manière sera d'exécuter mes promesses. » Literally obsessed with this sacred mother « who haunts [his] heart and [his] mind », the « grateful son » sees himself as incapable of fulfilling his poetic destiny without her undivided attention.

First edition, one of 500 copies, no grand papier (deluxe issue) copies.
Half morocco binding, spine with five raised bands, marbled paper boards framed in gilt, mould made flyleaves and pastedowns, original wrapper covers preserved, binding signed by Thomas Boichot.
Handsome copy signed and inscribed by Paul Verlaine to Émile Le Brun to whom Verlaine dedicated one of his poems (Dédicaces, sonnet XVI). 
This copy includes manuscript corrections by Paul Verlaine himself and an exceptional manuscript poem on page 123.
A nice copy, elegantly bound, containing the first printing of the famous Art poétique [Art Poetics], Verlaine's response to Boileau's Art Poétique.

Touching handwritten letter signed by Georges Bataille to Denise Rollin, 37 lines in pencil, small water stain in the top right not affecting the text.
Georges Bataille tries to reassure his companion Denise Rollin: “Je t'en supplie. Il ne faut pas t'inquiéter, mais pas du tout.” “I beg you. You must not worry, not at all.” She moved to Vézelay where Bataille would soon join her. He stayed in Paris where the bombings did not disrupt Parisian lives at all: “Tu n'imagines point à quel point les petits dégâts qu'on voit paraissent insignifiants à côté de la place intacte qu'il y a de tous les côtés. Pendant toute l'alerte, j'ai déjeuné bien tranquille avec mon chef de service de passage à Paris (il vit au front)” “You have no idea how insignificant the little damage you see seems next to the square untouched on all sides. Throughout the alert, I had a very quiet lunch with my head of service passing through Paris (he lives on the front)” Bataille did not give up his job as librarian at the National Library. Suffering from tuberculosis, he was not sent to the front, and he took the opportunity to write several texts at that time, such as Madame Edwarda and Le Coupable.
Further on, he mentions a visit: “Un peu après, Henri Michaux est venu me voir” “A little after, Henri Michaux came to see me” The two men had participated in the magazine Mesures and both had in common being separate from the surrealist nebula. In both of their respective works there is a violent independence and the same tension towards spirituality, a form of mysticism. Bataille had attended the seminary in his youth, and Michaux pleasantly said of him: “Il donne l'impression d'un séminariste sortant furtivement d'une pissotière.” “He gives the impression of a seminarian surreptitiously coming out of a public urinal.”
After this almost trivial news, Bataille embarks on an analysis of his feelings: “Ce que tu me dis dans ta lettre, c'est pour moi ce qui délivre, c'est comme la nudité, tout ce qui se déchire entre toi et moi. Mais, encore une fois, je ne me suis jamais senti aussi près de toi.” “What you tell me in your letter is for me what delivers, it is like nudity, everything that is torn apart between you and me. But, once again, I have never felt so close to you.” He asks his correspondent: “il faut me dire tout. C'est très doux que j'aie vu où tu es, que je connaisse les chemins que tu prendras, les ponts par où tu passeras.” “you must tell me everything. It is very sweet that I have seen you where you are, that I know the roads you will take, the bridges over which you will pass.” Sensuality is never far from the author's feelings: “Dis-moi aussi quelle chambre tu as: pour que je songe à toi dans cette chambre et à tout ce qui arrivera là quand nous serons de nouveau ensemble.” “Also tell me which room you have: so that I may think of you in that room and all that will happen there when we are together again.”
From this and past sensualities, there remain the fruits that are the children. Denise Rollin left for Vézelay in the company of her son Jean, nicknamed Bepsy: “Tu ne me dis rien de ta vie avec Bepsy [...] Bepsy est-il plus calme: moi aussi je l'ai entendu crier dans tes bras.” “You don't tell me anything of your life with Bepsy [...] Is Bepsy calmer: I too heard him screaming in your arms.” Bataille thanks Rollin: “Pour Sylvia je t'ai une immense reconnaissance de m'avoir aidé à changer.” “For Sylvia I am immensely grateful to you for helping me change.” Sylvia Bataille was the first wife of Georges Bataille. They were separated in 1934 but did not divorce until 1946. From this relationship, for the author: “Il ne reste que Laurence et la nécessité d'envisager les choses sans heurt” “This only thing that remains is Laurence and the need to consider things smoothly” Laurence was the daughter born of this marriage in 1930. She joined Bataille, Rollin and Bepsy in 1943 when her father moved to Vézelay.

First definitive editions, partly original.
Bound in red half-shagreen with corners, spine with four raised bands decorated with blind-stamped panels and fillets, the entwined monogram of Jules Hetzel at the foot, uncut copy, contemporary binding.
A few occasional spots of foxing.
Inscribed by the author to Jules Hetzel, “as a token of the author’s friendship.”

In the 1840s, Balzac “contributed to a collective volume illustrated with Grandville’s vignettes, Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, issued in parts by a new publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), who was to become a friend and play a crucial role in the consortium of publishers of La Comédie humaine. [Balzac] also assisted Hetzel in drafting texts signed ‘P.-J. Stahl,’ the publisher’s pseudonym.” (Roger Pierrot, Honoré de Balzac, Paris, Fayard, 1994)

An outstanding copy, inscribed by Balzac, in a charming contemporary binding.

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.

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.

First edition, one of 150 numbered copies on Hollande, the only deluxe issue copies after 5 on Japon.
A very fine copy, as issued, with an important manuscript document by Elme-Marie Caro, 1 page in ink on a double leaf, undated [1887 ?].
Maupassant's last novel Notre Coeur is also one of his most autobiographical. The writer was strongly influenced in this piece by famous literary and artistic "Salons" held by high society women, which he frequently attended. The novel confronts a man of letters with one of these strong-headed women of late 19th-century Paris. He describes the main character Michèle de Burne as "a woman of refinement, of indeterminate sensibility, restless, without fixed resolves, her feelings in constant turmoil, who seemed to have made it part of her experience to employ every narcotic that quiets the aching nerves: chloroform that stupefies, ether and morphine that excite to abnormal reverie, kill the senses, and deaden the emotions"
Maupassant sketches the fictional portrait of Countess Potocka, to whom he was one of the most fervent suitors, called "Macchabées" or "morts d'amour" , according to the rules of the literary game created in her famous Salon. He paints the picture of his unrequited love through this modern, liberated although oppressive woman, who only finds pleasure in the enslavement of her lover.

Our copy exceptionally contains a precious "Convocation extraordinaire du Club des Macchabées", an amusing original document written by philosopher Elme-Marie Caro.
Countess Potocka is referred to in the document as "the Patroness, Head of the Executive and Decorative Power of the Macchabees", and the list of her suitors "specially and ex officio summoned, without procrastination or apology" includes some of the Countess's Salon regulars: Clovis Bachelier, Adrien de Montebello, Olivier Taigny and Dubois were members of the administrative committee, painters Jean Béraud and Henri Gervex represented the art world, and writers Georges Legrand, Elme-Marie Caro and Gustave Schlumberger the literary world. The "President" of this society is none other than famous actor Coquelin aîné, member of the Comédie française.
Although he does not appear on this invitation, Maupassant played a major role in this infamous group as "Perpetual Secretary of the Permanent Council of the Club des Macchabées".
A precious document bearing witness to the fascinating Countess who inspired Maupassant, Marcel Proust for his Duchesse de Guermantes and Aimé Guerlain who created for her his Shore's Caprice perfume.

Partly first edition, gathering the most famous speeches by Victor Hugo, including some of his most memorable addresses delivered at the tribune of the Legislative Assembly—most notably the speech on constitutional revision and the powerful plea he gave at the trial of his son, on 11 June 1851, before the Cour d'assises of the Seine, in defense of the inviolability of human life. Spurious mention of “eighth edition.”
Complete with the rare portrait of the author by Masson printed on China paper, as frontispiece.
Scattered occasional foxing.
Precious inscribed copy signed by Victor Hugo to Juliette Drouet : « à mon pauvre doux ange aimé. V. »
A treasured copy belonging to Victor Hugo’s muse and mistress. This moving and remorseful dedication is Hugo’s response to the tragedy Juliette endured that same year, having just discovered he had been unfaithful for seven years with Léonie Biard. In June 1851, Biard sent Juliette the letters Victor had written to her. In July, Hugo swore eternal fidelity to Juliette, and in August inscribed this plea for a more compassionate justice to her.
In the autumn, Juliette demanded that Hugo meet Madame Biard to formally end the affair—a meeting she choreographed in every detail, and to which Hugo complied.
Provenance: libraries of Pierre Duché (1972, no. 75) and Philippe Zoummeroff (2001, no. 71).

First edition, an ordinary paper copy.
Contemporary green half shagreen, marbled paper boards, spine with five raised bands and gilt flowers, speckled edges.
With the autograph signatures of every author of the "Médan group" involved in the writing of this famous collection of short stories: Guy de Maupassant, Emile Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Léon Hennique, Paul Alexis and Henri Céard on the first endpaper.
A very good and rare copy in a strictly contemporary binding.

First edition, an advance (service de presse) copy.
Very precious and moving autograph inscription signed and dated by Maurice Blanchot to his mother and sister: "Personne ne reçoit tant de Dieu que celui qui est entièrement mort. Saint Grégoire. Pour sa chère maman et sa vieille Marg, en toute affection. Maurice [No one receives God so fully as someone who is entirely dead. Saint Gregory. For his darling mother and old Marg, with all love. Maurice]."
Three small wormholes and a clear dampstain to margin of upper cover, one joint cracked at foot.
Retaining its prière d'insérer.