Nodier contributed a preface to each volume. Together with Delangle, he was doing more than bringing a group of seventeenth-century literary curiosities back into print: he was creating a deliberately chosen small library reflecting the new taste for rare texts, neglected authors and earlier forms of French literature. Typography formed an integral part of the bibliophilic programme. Using the types of Jules Didot, the series restored a decorative richness partly excluded by the severe neoclassical typography of the preceding generation, employing ornamental initials, headpieces and tailpieces in deliberate dialogue with earlier French books.
The dedication of the series to the Duchesse de Berry placed the undertaking within the aristocratic bibliophilia of the Restoration. The present set, however, contains another dedication, infinitely more personal, which gives the copy its particular significance.
On the half-title of the first edition of Nodier’s Poésies diverses, the author has inscribed:
« Si ce petit livre valoit la peine d'être offert, je l'aurois offert à mon bon ami Alphonse de Cailleux. Charles Nodier »
The apparently self-deprecating formula is above all one of friendship. Alphonse de Cailleux belonged to the circle most closely associated with Nodier’s artistic and antiquarian activities during these years. An administrator of the Royal Museums, an artist and connoisseur, he collaborated with Charles Nodier and Baron Taylor on the Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France, the vast enterprise begun in 1820 which played an important role in the rediscovery and preservation of France’s architectural heritage.
Their association therefore went well beyond literary sociability. Together they worked on a project in which writers, artists and administrators of the arts brought text, image and the study of historic monuments into a single undertaking. In May 1825, the very year in which the Collection des petits classiques françois began to appear, Cailleux travelled to Reims with Nodier, Victor Hugo and the painter Jean Alaux for the coronation of Charles X. Hugo himself later recalled his travelling companions and mentioned Cailleux in correspondence written during the journey.
The inscription thus places Nodier’s Poésies diverses at the centre of a particularly dense network. The Nodier who modestly offers his book to his “bon ami” was simultaneously librarian of the Arsenal, one of the leading figures of the early Romantic circle, a collaborator on the Voyages pittoresques, and the bibliophile-editor who, with Delangle, was giving new material life to neglected writers of earlier centuries. Cailleux represented the museological and patrimonial side of the same movement.
The four volumes added to the original series extend this coherence while remaining bibliographically distinct from the eight Petits classiques. They comprise Fénelon’s Fables, published by Rapilly in 1826; Nodier’s Poésies diverses, published by Delangle and Ladvocat in 1827; Mme Evelines Désormery’s Poésies, issued by Delangle in 1828; and Édouard Turquety’s Esquisses poétiques, likewise published by Delangle in 1829.
The last of these provides an especially apt continuation of the set’s history. Turquety was still a very young poet when he came to Paris and was welcomed and encouraged by Nodier, who introduced him to Delangle. The Esquisses poétiques was his first book. The man who had recently restored neglected seventeenth-century authors to print thus also became the intermediary through whom a young contemporary poet entered the literary world.
Delangle provides another continuous thread through the collection. Publisher of the original series, of Désormery and Turquety, and co-publisher with Ladvocat of Nodier’s own poems, he belonged to the generation of publishers who gave material form to early French Romanticism. Although the twelve volumes were brought together after publication, they consequently reconstruct with remarkable coherence a small network of books, publishers and friendships centred upon Nodier in the 1820s.
Half a century later, Émile Carayon gave the group its present material unity. By clothing the twelve volumes in revival bindings directly inspired by the decorative vocabulary of the Restoration, while preserving the original wrappers in almost every case, he did not seek to efface the period in which the books had appeared, but rather to recreate it. Early Romanticism, which had itself cultivated the monuments and surviving forms of earlier ages, had by then become a historical period worthy of collecting in its own right.
A particularly desirable association set comprising one of 25 copies on Dutch paper of the complete Collection des petits classiques françois, together with four contemporary volumes closely connected with Nodier’s circle, including the first edition of his Poésies diverses inscribed to “mon bon ami Alphonse de Cailleux”: a direct record of the friendship between two collaborators on the Voyages pittoresques at the moment when literature, the fine arts and the preservation of the past were combining to shape early French Romanticism.
