[Album d'un pessimiste] Oeuvres posthumes

First edition of Album d’un pessimiste, here in its exceptionally rare earliest state. In this copy, both the title-page and half-title still bear the heading Œuvres posthumes.

Three states of the edition are known. The first, represented by the present copy, retains Œuvres posthumes on both title-page and half-title. In the second state, a new title-page reads Album d’un pessimiste, while the half-title remains unchanged; this is the state most commonly described in bibliographies. A third state, dated 1836, again bears the title Album d’un pessimiste and also alters the preliminary matter, the announced notice by L’Héritier being replaced by a biographical notice taken from Michaud’s Biographie universelle.

Contemporary half black morocco. Spines with false bands and broad blind rules, title and volume number gilt. The owner’s name “Gauger” gilt at foot. Slight rubbing to headcaps, two corners a little bumped, a few very pale spots of foxing. A good copy.

Rabbe’s writings are preceded by Victor Hugo’s poem À Alphonse Rabbe, which Hugo included the same year in Les Chants du crépuscule. The collection was assembled and edited by Léon Rabbe, the writer’s nephew, several years after his death.

The Album brings together essays, maxims, meditations, commentaries and prose poems dominated by failure, disillusionment and despair. Rabbe, who had contracted syphilis after his stay in Spain and later became dependent on opium, died in 1829 after taking a large dose, without it being possible to determine with certainty whether his death was suicide or accident. This sombre tone runs throughout the collection and helps explain the singular place the work would occupy within French dark Romanticism.

Victor Hugo pays tribute to him at the opening of the book; several decades later, Baudelaire would still invoke Rabbe in Fusées, even referring to a “ton Alphonse Rabbe”. That afterlife is all the more striking because the work itself took time to settle into its final material identity.

In this earliest state, the book had not yet become the Album d’un pessimiste by which it would be remembered: it still appeared simply as Œuvres posthumes. The change of title adopted in the later states gives the present copy a distinctive place in the history of the text itself.