Manuscrit autographe inédit et complet "Notes sur les Indes"

Unpublished complete autograph manuscript, dated and signed, written by the Vicomte Edmond de Poncins between 12 September 1891 and 12 June 1892. 775 pages, incorrectly numbered 1-567 and then 567-774. Small folio (21 x 34.5 cm).

Contemporary half dark green shagreen with corners, spine with five raised bands ruled in black and decorated with blind compartments and central gilt floral tools, lettered in gilt "Notes sur l'Inde, 1892". At the beginning of the volume, the author himself gives the slightly different title "Notes sur les Indes". Green boards framed with blind rules, comb-marbled endpapers, red top edge.

The author's engraved bookplate, depicting a tent pitched beneath a baobab tree, is mounted on one pastedown.

This extensive journal opens at Marseille on 12 September 1891, as Poncins boards the Peï-Ho, a Messageries Maritimes mail steamer employed on the Far Eastern route from 1870. Among his fellow passengers he mentions the governor of Obock, almost certainly Léonce Lagarde, then head of the colony, and a British general responsible for inspecting the cavalry of India.

At the age of twenty-five, Poncins had yet to acquire the reputation and distinctions that his explorations of Central Asia would soon bring him. Everything that would characterise his later career is nevertheless already present in these pages: geographical curiosity, an appetite for difficult routes, close attention to terrain and communications, and the passion for hunting that was to determine much of his subsequent travelling.

The journal follows his progress across the subcontinent almost day by day. After Bombay and Poona, he visits the Buddhist cave sanctuaries of Karlee and Ajanta, then travels through Gujarat, where he undertakes crocodile hunts on the Sabarmati. He continues into Rajasthan, through Udaipur, Jaipur and Alwar, before reaching Delhi, Agra and the Ganges valley. Calcutta begins a new phase of the narrative, dominated by a prolonged hunting expedition through the marshes and mangroves of the Sunderbans, followed by a journey into Assam. Poncins eventually returns westwards through the Punjab to Karachi, where the journal ends on 12 June 1892.

This journey was not reconstructed retrospectively. The succession of dates, the continuity of the writing and the sheer scale of the manuscript preserve the rhythm of immediate experience. Departures, delays, stages and incidents alternate with descriptions of cities, landscapes and monuments. Poncins records the animals pursued, the conditions of the hunt, means of transport, encounters and the practical details of travel. India emerges not as an ordered survey, but as a succession of places experienced through walking, rail travel, navigation and camp life.

Hunting frequently provides the immediate purpose of a stage, but it does not exhaust Poncins's observations. It draws him towards wetlands, forests, rivers and territories distant from the major cities, forcing him to attend closely to topography and to the practical conditions of movement. In the Sunderbans and later in Assam, the journal consequently becomes an incremental exploration of the environment, in which the quarry, the landscape and the organisation of the expedition cannot be separated.

This first Indian journey directly prepared the expedition that was to establish his reputation. In 1893 Poncins travelled into Central Asia, crossing from Russian Turkestan through the Pamirs to Kashmir and recording his stages, temperature readings, cartographical observations and photographs. The material he deposited with the Société de géographie, now preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, reveals the methodical precision developed during these journeys. The expedition earned him a silver medal from the Société de géographie and formed the basis of his Chasses et explorations dans la région des Pamirs, published in 1897.

Born at Saint-Cyr-les-Vignes on 25 March 1866, Edmond de Montaigne, Vicomte de Poncins, devoted a considerable part of his life to geographical and hunting expeditions. An explorer, cartographer and photographer, he returned from his 1893 journey with an important body of photographs and documents which he presented to the Société de géographie. In 1897 he accompanied Prince Henri d'Orléans from Djibouti to Addis Ababa on a mission to Emperor Menelik, and in 1913 published his Note sur le gros gibier de nos colonies.

His marriage in 1903 to Marguerite de Biencourt connected him with the collections of the Château d'Azay-le-Rideau. His personal library, dispersed at Cheverny in 2002, bore the same tent bookplate preserved in the present volume. The mark therefore does more than establish the manuscript's provenance: it places it within the books, maps, photographs and souvenirs assembled by Poncins around his journeys.

No earlier narrative of comparable extent has so far been identified among the known manuscripts, publications and archives of Edmond de Poncins. These Notes sur les Indes therefore appear to constitute the earliest substantial surviving record of his vocation as an explorer, two years before the Pamir expedition that brought him wider recognition.

An important unpublished autograph journal of 775 pages, recording over eight months the formation of the future explorer of the Pamirs. Before the medals, publications and major expeditions, India provided Edmond de Poncins with his first continent to traverse, measure and set down in writing.