Les fleurs du mal

BAUDELAIRE Charles
Les Fleurs du mal [The Flowers of Evil] Poulet-Malassis & De Broise, Paris 1857, 122 x 195 mm (4 13/16 x 7 11/16 ”), full morocco, custom slipcase First edition on vélin d'Angoulême paper, complete with the six censored poems.
A superb Jansenist binding by Semet & Plumelle in deep red morocco, spine in six compartments, date gilt at foot of spine, gilt roulettes to head- and tail-pieces, black morocco pastedowns framed with gilt fillet, purple moiré silk endpapers, covers and spine preserved (upper cover and spine with traces of restoration work), gilt fillet to edges of covers, all edges gilt; slipcase edged with deep red morocco, marbled paper boards, lined with brown cloth.
An exceedingly rare copy of the first issue, which as well as all the usual typographic errors of the first edition (“Feurs du mal”, pagination error and so on), also has a printing error on p.12 (“s'enhardissent” for “s'enhardissant”). Corrected from the start of the print run, this printing error only remains in an absolutely tiny number of copies.
This copy is enriched with a manuscript correction by Baudelaire, who has crossed out the “e” and added an “a” in the margin, as if correcting proofs.
This printing error, not in the corrected proofs in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, was due to the printers, who introduced a number of errors into this first quire, most of which were spotted before printing by Baudelaire, as this letter to Poulet-Malassis attests: “I have just received the first leaf. I hope it's not been printed, because your workmen have introduced new faults into it, like for example ‘points' for ‘poings', and so on.”
The error in “s'enhardissant” must have escaped his notice in the first instance and was not corrected till after printing had commenced.
Baudelaire immediately corrected this error on the first copies he received – in pencil, as was his habit – before having the type corrected. After they had finished printing, he went on finding seven other faults one after the other, which he also corrected by hand on some copies as and when he found them.
The bibliographies generally have “s'enhardissant” as the only error corrected during the printing process itself, but our copy also has other particularities which do not appear in most of the 1,300 copies of the first edition.
For instance, on the verso of the half-title, there are four elements that are present on our copy which were successively to disappear during the course of printing:
– “Les Editeurs” has an accent on the ‘E'.
– There is a space between “Ils poursuivront” and the comma that follows it.
– “toutes contrefaçons et toutes traductions” would later become “toutes contrefaçons et traductions”.
– “Les traits” does not yet have a capital letter.
The typographic corrections did not appear all at the same time. Thus, some copies have all these characteristics except the space before the comma, while others are entirely corrected, but with the space reinstated and another space inserted after “Lois” (which serves to order the typographic layout of the page).
The title page also has several more or less marked variants:
– The absence of the full stop and final bracket after “Les tragiques, liv. II”, which characterizes this copy, was corrected on many others.
– The space between the “4” and the comma in Poulet-Malassis' address is not yet present in this first impression, but would appear in other copies independently of the previous correction.
– Finally, the spacing of the characters in the publisher's name differs according to title page. On ours, “libraires-éditeurs” ends level with the final “B” of “Broise”; while on other title pages, it finishes before the “B” or, by contrast, halfway along the “R”.
The other copies we have consulted do not show a homogeneity of corrections, and one can see several states of the title page, with one or more corrections.
A thorough analysis of these changes remains, therefore, to be undertaken. Let us merely say that the copies on Hollande that we have seen show the same typographic characteristics as ours, except for the error in “s'enhardissant”.
Let us also add that, contrary to the bibliographical information in current usage, the covers do not show differences other than the ones described by Carteret, first and foremost. Some of the errors that have appeared on the title page of this copy are indeed found on some covers, mostly on those of the so-called “third state”, which seems always to be present on first impression copies, like those on Hollande (whose only difference with this “third state” is the price – 6fr instead of 3fr – marked on the back).
The covers having been printed after the main body of the work – if Baudelaire's letters are to be believed – it is hard to draw conclusions about this correlation between the first issue and the third state of the cover; but it does open the way to certain hypotheses.
Might we suppose that the succession of states is not as we believe it to be and that, like the first quire, the errors were not corrected during printing but, quite the contrary, “introduced” by the workers at the press?
A number of questions remain up in the air surrounding the printing and distribution of this work, despite its important place within French literature. Thus, non-expurgated copies are often presented as copies sold before Poulet-Malassis' “ridiculous surgical intervention” (to borrow a phrase from Baudelaire) on the 200 copies still available. In actual fact, Baudelaire's correspondence, like that of Poulet-Malassis, reveals that sales were far less galloping and most of the copies were quite simply pulled and “put away somewhere safe” by the author and the publisher. “Quick, hide – but hide well! – the whole of the edition; you must have 900 copies still unbound. There are another hundred at Lanier's; they seemed quite taken aback that I wanted to save 50; I put them in a safe place...There are 50 left, then, to feed Justice, that Hound of Hell!” Baudelaire wrote to Poulet-Malassis on 11 July 1857. The publisher, too, swung into action by spreading his stock around various “accomplices”, including Asselineau, to whom he wrote on 13 July: “Baudelaire wrote me an urgent letter that I received yesterday, in which he informed me of the seizure. I want to see him before I believe it, but in any event we've taken some precautions. The copies are safe and thanks to your good will, we will be sending by rail today a case with 200 copies still unbound, which I would ask you to save until my next visit...”
We have found no trace of these copies, placed in storage, then being brought back into commercial circulation. Could one draw a link between these unbound copies and the various states of the cover, for which we do not really know the reason (corrections being almost entirely insignificant)? Could these copies have been put back into circulation intact, despite the verdict?
The rarity of copies of the first edition of les Fleurs du Mal would lead one to suspect that the unsold copies that were not subjected to censure disappeared, at least in part. That said, the enormous importance of this work has made it, right from the start, one of the most universally sought-after bibliographical items (a note on Poulet-Malassis' copy reveals that the prices of copies on Hollande multiplied by six in barely a few months) and therefore most difficult to acquire.
Copies of the first impression – ours with an error corrected by the poet himself – in prestigious signed bindings are, after the few on Hollande and inscribed copies, the rarest and most prestigious state of this founding work of modern poetry.