Le Livre posthume. Mémoires d'un suicidé recueillis et publiés par Maxime Du Camp

First edition, one of 20 deluxe copies on Holland paper, the only large-paper issue, reimposed in octavo, while the ordinary edition was issued in duodecimo. Vicaire and Carteret record 25 copies; the printed justification on the verso of the half-title in the present copy, however, states 20. Cf. Vicaire III, 305-306; Carteret I, 222.

Contemporary full stiff ivory vellum, smooth spine with longitudinal printed title, marbled-paper endleaves and pastedowns. A fine copy.

A particularly desirable signed autograph presentation inscription appears on the half-title: “À Monsieur Jules Janin, Hommage de dévouement.

 Maxime Du Camp.” Jules Janin (1804-1874), dramatic critic for the Journal des débats and one of the most influential figures in Parisian criticism, was long known as the “prince of critics”. The copy demonstrably entered his library, as confirmed by his bookplate on the preliminary leaves, a red cartouche within a gilt frame lettered “Ex libris Jules Janin”.

Maxime Du Camp’s first novel, Le Livre posthume appeared in 1853, shortly after the great journey to the East undertaken with Gustave Flaubert between 1849 and 1851. Du Camp had already travelled in the region and published Souvenirs et paysages d’Orient in 1848; the later journey with Flaubert also provided the material for Égypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie, published in 1852 and establishing his lasting reputation as a travel photographer.

The novel transforms this experience into a dark fiction. A young traveller, consumed by ennui and disillusionment, writes his memoirs before killing himself in the Egyptian desert; Du Camp thus adopts the device of a posthumous manuscript supposedly collected and published by the narrator. The East is no longer merely a picturesque setting, but the scene of an intimate confession governed by malaise, solitude, and the desire to escape the self.

The affinity with Flaubert is particularly striking. Reading the book by his former travelling companion, Flaubert recognised in it “a vague reminiscence of Novembre and a mist of myself”. The parallel was later developed by Edmond Maynial in 1927, who compared the two narratives and emphasised the debt of Du Camp’s novel to the inward world of Novembre, then still unpublished but known to Du Camp.

This literary proximity belongs precisely to the moment when the paths of the two friends began to diverge. Companions in Brittany in 1847 and later in the East, Flaubert and Du Camp returned to France with increasingly different ambitions: Flaubert withdrew to Croisset to concentrate on Madame Bovary, while Du Camp assumed a growing role in Parisian literary and social life.

The copy presented to Jules Janin therefore stands exactly at the intersection of these two worlds. Behind the text lies the imprint of Flaubert and their shared journey to the East; before the published book stands Janin, embodiment of the Parisian critical establishment to which Du Camp was now turning. In one of only twenty deluxe copies, this double presence makes the volume a particularly significant witness to the moment when a literary friendship became a divergence of careers.