Mémoires et récits

Illustrated edition, with compositions drawn and engraved on wood by Léon Schulz: a frontispiece printed in red and black, together with numerous headpieces and tailpieces. The edition was limited to 1,230 copies; ours is one of the numbered copies on Rives laid paper.

Bound in full peacock-blue shagreen, smooth spine lettered in gilt with author and title, marbled paper pastedowns, top edge gilt, original wrappers preserved. Binding sunned, with marginal fading to the upper cover and spine, and a scratch to the upper cover.

The copy from the library of the writer and filmmaker Carlo Rim (pen name of Jean Marius Richard), enriched with eight letters by Frédéric Mistral, in French and Provençal, mounted on guards at the front of the volume. All are addressed to Carlo Rim’s father, Marius Richard, editor-in-chief of Le Petit Provençal, who was among Mistral’s acquaintances in Nîmes and was himself a Félibre poet.

Loosely inserted: a three-page autograph letter dated 8 July 1969, addressed to Carlo Rim by a correspondent whose signature is barely legible, concerning the publication of Marius Richard’s poems in the newspaper Le Gard; five typescript leaves by Carlo Rim transcribing the Mistral letters bound into the volume; and a small press cutting from L’Express.

This small archive brings together eight autograph letters and notes by Frédéric Mistral, addressed between 1896 and 1908 to the journalist and poet Marius Richard, then living in Nîmes. The correspondence portrays a Mistral keenly attentive to the Félibrige revival in Nîmes, urging its young people to form a "bataioun sacra" for the renaissance of the Midi. He settles the bullfighting question in no uncertain terms: the Spanish corrida belongs only within the walls of the Arena, the Provençal course everywhere else. Above all, in a page of biting irony aimed at the "françisants de province" who ape Parisian manners, he reminds his correspondent that the language, and the actual speaking of it, outweighs any other form of loyalty to one’s native land.

The letters of 1897 and 1898 shed light on the Nîmes revival of Calendal, set to music by Henri Maréchal. Here the poet defers, with pointed modesty, to the men of the theatre: "Mon poème est un poème, le livret est un livret, et le théâtre est le théâtre". They also document the early days of the Museon Arlaten, whose collections were then being assembled: Mistral asks Richard to acquire in Nîmes photographs of the Arena, the Maison Carrée, the Temple of Diana and the Pont du Gard, intended for a series devoted to the "Rhône monumental". The later notes mention the portrait of Mistral painted by Paul Saïn, the defence of the landscapes of Les Baux, and the plan to revive a Félibrige group in Nîmes under the aegis of the capoulié Pierre Devoluy. Bearing witness to a friendship that progresses from "cher confrère" to the "cher Richard" whom Mistral embraces, this correspondence in Provençal and French illuminates the place the poet accorded Marius Richard in the literary and Félibrige life of the Gard.

Carlo Rim’s typescript transcription records a ninth autograph item by Mistral, which is not present in the volume: a photograph of the poet inscribed on the verso with his congratulations on the drama Dans la tourmente, performed in the Arena of Nîmes in 1909.

Carlo Rim’s copy, in which he devoutly gathered, within these Mémoires, the letters the Master of Maillane had addressed to his father, making the volume at once a book of remembrance and a filial reliquary.