Manuscrit autographe signé du récit Le Phénomène

Signed autograph manuscript, 6 pages, of Georges Courteline's story Le Phénomène, later published by Flammarion in 1897 in Un client sérieux.

Numerous deletions; one passage does not appear in the printed versions of the text.

Green Bradel boards, author and title lettered in gilt lengthwise on spine. Manuscript on fragments of leaves of lined paper, pasted onto six pages. Some rubbing and soiling to boards, figures in blue pencil written over the text, traces of glue and light soiling to leaves.

Original manuscript of a story full of self-mockery, in which Georges Courteline recounts his first attempts at cycling, at a time when the bicycle was arousing great enthusiasm in France.

Le Phénomène, a humorous story centred on the bicycle, first appeared on 13 August 1895 in Le Journal, Quotidien Littéraire, Artistique et Politique, edited by Fernand Xau. With his characteristic mocking wit, Courteline sketches a few typical figures of French society, caught in the practice of a pastime then rapidly spreading. Père Croustelier, the bearded instructor of the novice cyclists at the "Pistes galantes" school, whom Courteline likens to a muezzin, also appears in Quand je pédalais, another story on the same subject collected in Un client sérieux (1897). The anecdote recounting the ruse by which a young cyclist manages to impress both "half a dozen cretins" who have come to learn the art of cycling and their teacher is drawn from the author's own experience. The advent of the "safety bicycle", close to the modern bicycle, opened cycling to a wide public: safer, as its name indicates, it was far easier to handle than the penny-farthing with its outsized front wheel. From the late 1880s onwards, cycling attracted the attention of several writers, among them Alfred Jarry, Alphonse Allais and above all Émile Zola, who described himself as "a cycling fanatic". It was indeed Le Journal that published in 1898 his novel Paris, in which the bicycle plays a significant role as the favourite accessory of Marie, a free-spirited and sporting young woman. 

The many deletions in the manuscript reveal Courteline's process of rewriting, while certain elements were not retained in the version published by Le Journal, although the manuscript itself bears no indication of these changes. Several alterations are superficial, with words replaced by equivalents: "le candidat bicycliste" becomes "le personnage", "l'apprenti cycliste" becomes "le néophyte". One of these substitutions seems to reflect a mild form of censorship: "foutez-moi le camp" ["get the hell out of here"] is replaced by "fichez-moi le camp" ["get out of here"] in the printed versions. 
A more substantial change was presumably made to tighten the narrative, but it deprives the reader of Courteline's personal feelings about a laborious apprenticeship. Whereas the published text ends with admiration for the main character's cunning and a vaguer remark on the author's sporting future, the manuscript betrays a certain lack of confidence on Courteline's part in his own progress, which he nevertheless views with humour:

"[I applauded, in petto, his ingenuity with all my might, and promised myself to follow his example from the very day my abilities would allow me to do so.] When will that be? Next week, no doubt; or the one after; ... or some other. The fact is that I am making slow progress, if indeed I am making any progress at all; ... of which I am not sure. Bah! I do as my fellows do: I console myself for my own ignorance by making fun of what others know."

The manuscript was recorded as early as 1938, when it appeared in volume 45 of the Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, in the column devoted to reviewing catalogues of nineteenth- and twentieth-century autographs.

Bearing witness both to Courteline's writing process and to the editorial requirements of Le Journal, this manuscript belongs to the cultural phenomenon that was the bicycle in the late nineteenth century.