Lettre autographe signée de Charles Baudelaire à Poulet-Malassis relative à ses interminables corrections d'épreuves des Fleurs du Mal

Handwritten letter signed by Charles Baudelaire to Poulet-Malassis relating to his never-ending proofreading of Fleurs du Mal
Exceptional handwritten letter signed by Baudelaire relating to his never-ending proofreading, addresses to the publisher of Fleurs du Mal, Poulet-Malassis, 30 March 1857 – two months before the work was published.
Baudelaire anxiously oversees the printing of the first leaves and insults his publisher concerning the proofreading, which Poulet-Malassis insistently and diplomatically demands.
On 30 December 1856, Baudelaire signed the publishing deal for Les Fleurs du Mal with Auguste Poulet-Malassis and his brother-in-law Eugène de Broise, booksellers and publishers in Alençon. Intense exchanges ensued with Poulet-Malassis, who demanded the proof corrections, which Baudelaire, an extreme perfectionist, was slow to send him. The typographic composition of this mythical collection indeed passed through several stages: the galley proofs printed on the recto without page indications (mentioned in the letter: “You will receive [...] on Thursday, your 5th [leaf] and on Friday your galley proofs!”), then the proofs printed recto-verso, paginated and numbered, to form the twelve leaf notebooks, joined together during stitching. At each stage, the proofs were carefully reread by Baudelaire, going as far as ordering three impressions before approving the definitive version. Writing hastily and feverishly, in the letter he confides: “I want to reread everything again, I am so afraid of mistakes.”


This missive testifies to the poet's great nervousness, then torn between his own impatience and Malassis' exasperation – who sees himself almost forced to print without waiting for Baudelaire's corrections: “Your letter is as unfair as it is foolish, and if on Wednesday, the post being late, the leaf not having arrived with you, and if you print straight away, as you have threatened, you will force me simply to reimburse all of your expenses. This will be hard for me, but I will succeed.” Baudelaire, already famous in certain circles for the poems he recited, cannot satisfy himself with the existing corrections, and finishes his letter to Malassis on a cutting postscript: “Check the page numbers and the Roman numerals carefully.”
Despite Baudelaire's efforts, several errors slipped through into the first edition, which the poet corrected by hand in the copies that he offered to those close to him.