Théophile Gautier. Notice littéraire précédée d'une lettre de Victor Hugo

First edition, of which only 500 copies were issued. With an etched frontispiece portrait of Théophile Gautier by Emile Thérond.

With a substantial prefatory letter by Victor Hugo.

Red morocco binding, gilt date at the foot of spine, marbled endpapers, Baudelairian ex-libris from Renée Cortot's collection glued on the first endpaper, wrappers preserved, top edge gilt.
Pale foxing affecting the first and last leaves, beautiful copy perfectly set.
Rare handwritten inscription signed by Charles Baudelaire: “ à mon ami Paul Meurice. Ch. Baudelaire. ” (“To my friend Paul Meurice. Ch. Baudelaire.”)
An autograph ex-dono slip by Victor Hugo, addressed to Paul Meurice, has been added to this copy by ourselves and mounted on a guard. This slip, which was doubtless never used, had nevertheless been prepared, along with several others, by Victor Hugo in order to present his friend with a copy of his works published in Paris during his exile. If History did not allow Hugo to send this volume to Meurice, this presentation note, hitherto unused, could not, in our view, be more fittingly associated.

Provenance: Paul Meurice, then Alfred and Renée Cortot.

This exceptional manuscript dedication from Charles Baudelaire to Paul Meurice, the true surrogate brother of Victor Hugo, bears witness to a singular literary encounter between two of the most important French poets, Hugo and Baudelaire.

Paul Meurice was indeed the indispensable intermediary between the condemned poet and his illustrious exiled counterpart, for asking Victor Hugo to associate their names with this elegy to Théophile Gautier was one of Charles Baudelaire’s great audacities, and would scarcely have had any chance of succeeding without the invaluable assistance of Paul Meurice.

Ghost-writer to Dumas, author of Fanfan la Tulipe and the theatrical adaptations of Victor Hugo, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas and Théophile Gautier, Paul Meurice was a gifted writer who chose to remain in the shadow of the great artists of his time. His unique relationship with Victor Hugo nevertheless granted him a decisive role in literary history. More than a friend, Paul, together with Auguste Vacquerie, stood in place of Victor Hugo’s deceased brothers: « j'ai perdu mes deux frères ; lui et vous, vous et lui, vous les remplacez ; seulement j'étais le cadet ; je suis devenu l'aîné, voilà toute la différence.  [“I have lost my two brothers; he and you, you and he, you replace them; only I was the younger; I have become the elder, that is the only difference.”] It was to this brother of the heart (whose wedding he witnessed alongside Ingres and Dumas) that the exiled poet entrusted his literary and financial affairs, and it was he whom Hugo named, together with Auguste Vacquerie, as his executor. After the poet’s death, Meurice founded the Maison Victor Hugo, which remains today one of the most celebrated writers’ house-museums.

In 1859, Paul’s home had become the Parisian antechamber to Victor Hugo’s Anglo-Norman retreat, and Baudelaire therefore turned quite naturally to this official ambassador. Baudelaire knew Meurice well, ever since an earlier intercession on his behalf with Hugo had earned him an exceptional copy of Les Fleurs du Mal as a testament of friendship. The two men also shared a close friend, Théophile Gautier, with whom Meurice had worked from 1842 on an adaptation of Falstaff. Meurice thus stood as the ideal intermediary through whom to secure the goodwill of the otherwise inaccessible Hugo.

Baudelaire had, however, already met Victor Hugo briefly. At the age of nineteen, he sought an audience with the greatest modern poet, to whom he had been devoted since childhood: “Je vous aime comme on aime un héros, un livre, comme on aime purement et sans intérêt toute belle chose.” ["I love you as one loves a hero, a book, as one loves purely and disinterestedly every beautiful thing."] Even then, he imagined himself as a worthy successor, as he half-confesses: “à dix-neuf ans eussiez-vous hésité à en écrire autant à [...] Chateaubriand par exemple.” ["At nineteen, would you have hesitated to write as much to [...] Chateaubriand, for instance?"] For the young apprentice poet, Victor Hugo belonged to the past, and Baudelaire would soon seek to free himself from this weighty model.

From his very first work, Le Salon de 1845, the iconoclast Baudelaire castigates his former idol, declaring the end of Romanticism of which Hugo is the absolute representative: "These are the last ruins of the old Romanticism [...] It is Mr. Victor Hugo who lost Boulanger- after having lost so many others- it is the poet who cast the painter into the pit."

A year later, in the Salon de 1846, he renewed his attack with even greater ferocity, dethroning the Romantic master: 

"For if my definition of Romanticism (intimacy, spirituality, etc.) places Delacroix at the head of Romanticism, it naturally excludes Mr. Victor Hugo. [...] Mr. Victor Hugo, whose nobility and majesty I do not wish to diminish, is a craftsman far more skilled than inventive, a worker far more correct than creative. [...] Too material, too attentive to the surfaces of nature, Mr. Victor Hugo has become a painter in poetry."

This parricidal gesture could not have been fully realised without a substitute figure. It was Théophile Gautier who served as a renewed model for the younger generation, while Victor Hugo, soon to be exiled, would publish little else but political writings for nearly a decade. Thus, when Baudelaire, through the precious intermediary of Paul Meurice, presented a copy of his Fleurs du mal to Victor Hugo, he knew he was imposing upon him the striking printed dedication at the head of the volume: « Au poète impeccable au parfait magicien ès Lettres françaises à mon très cher et très vénéré maître et ami Théophile Gautier » ["To the impeccable poet, the perfect magician of French Letters, my very dear and most revered master and friend Théophile Gautier"]. The young poet’s intention could not escape Hugo, and Baudelaire could scarcely have anticipated Hugo’s luminous response: « Vos Fleurs du mal rayonnent et éblouissent comme des étoiles » ["Your Fleurs du mal shine and dazzle like stars "].

With his article on Théophile Gautier published in L’Artiste on 13 March 1859, Baudelaire pursued the same aim: to close the chapter on “Victor Hugo” in the history of French literature. More skillful and respectful than his previous writings -“Our neighbours speak of Shakespeare and Goethe; we may answer Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier!” - Baudelaire’s prose is nonetheless clear and decisive: Hugo is dead, long live Gautier, “this writer whom the world will envy us, as it envies Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, and Balzac.”

The critics were not mistaken, and the article’s reception was decidedly cold. Baudelaire then embarked on the daring notion of linking Victor Hugo to his own dethronement, publishing under both names the advent of a new poetic era, with this pamphlet as its manifesto.

By his own account, the audacious poet had already “committed this prodigious impropriety [of sending his article to Victor Hugo on] printed paper without enclosing a letter, any homage, or expression of respect and fidelity.” Undoubtedly, Baudelaire intended a rebuke to his elder. The affair would likely have ended there, had Paul Meurice not intervened, informing the impetuous poet of the master’s favourable judgment - an undoubtedly gracious letter, now forever lost.

Learning this, Baudelaire composed a letter to Victor Hugo of extraordinary boldness and sincerity:
“Monsieur, I am in the greatest need of you, and I invoke your generosity. A few months ago, I wrote a rather long article on my friend Théophile Gautier, which caused such a burst of laughter among fools that I decided to publish it as a small pamphlet, if only to demonstrate that I never repent. - I had requested that the journal send you a copy. I do not know if you received it; but I have learned through our mutual friend, M. Paul Meurice, that you had kindly written to me, a letter that has not yet been recovered.”

Plainly, he sets out his intentions, neither denying the impertinence of his article nor the true purpose of his appeal: “My aim was above all to bring the reader’s mind back to that wonderful literary age over which you reigned as true king, an era which remains in my memory as a delightful childhood recollection. [...] I need you. I need a voice higher than mine and that of Théophile Gautier - your commanding voice. I wish to be under your protection. I will humbly print whatever you may deign to write. Pray, do not hesitate. Should you find anything to censure in these proofs, be assured I shall present your censure dutifully, but without excessive shame. A criticism from you, is it not still a caress, since it is an honour?”

He spares not even Gautier, “whose name has served as a pretext for my critical reflections; I may confidentially admit that I am aware of the lacunae of his astonishing mind.”
It is naturally to Paul Meurice that he entrusts his “weighty missive.” Confident of a favourable reply - “Hugo’s letter will doubtless arrive on Tuesday, and magnificent I believe it will be” (letter to Poulet-Malassis, 25 September 1859) - Baudelaire takes particular care to highlight the prestigious preface writer, whose name will be printed in the same type size as his own.

Yet the letter is delayed, and Baudelaire again addresses his grievances to Meurice: “It is evident that if some reason had prevented M. Hugo from responding to my request, he would have informed me. I must therefore suppose an accident” (letter to Paul Meurice, 5 October 1859). As it happened, Victor Hugo had indeed sent his prefatory reply; it arrived soon after, and Baudelaire had it printed in its entirety at the head of his Théophile Gautier.

Yet this is no mere preface; it is a true rejoinder, composed with all the elegance of the master. Hugo does not content himself with the weighty attributes that Baudelaire ascribes to him, who, in the same work, describes the poet of Les Contemplations: “Victor Hugo, great, terrible, immense as a mythical creation, cyclopean, so to speak, represents the enormous forces of nature and their harmonious struggle.”

To Baudelaire’s manifesto:
“Thus the principle of poetry is, strictly and simply, the human aspiration towards a higher Beauty. [...] If the poet has pursued a moral aim, he has diminished his poetic power (...) Poetry cannot, under penalty of death or decline, be equated with science or morality; it has not Truth for its object, it has only Itself.”

Hugo sets forth his own precepts:
“You are not mistaken in anticipating some dissent between you and me. [...] I have never said Art for Art’s sake; I have always said Art for Progress. [...] The poet cannot walk alone, it is necessary that man also moves. The steps of Humanity are therefore the very steps of Art.”

Unmoved by Baudelaire’s recollections of him as a “delightful memory of childhood,” the writer had by no means completed his prodigious œuvre. In this small pamphlet from one of his keenest critics, he outlines the trajectory of his impending works: La Légende des siècles, scheduled for release that month, and, three years on, Les Misérables, the preeminent social and humanist epic in the canon of world literature.

Baudelaire dispatched inscribed copies of his Gautier to the artists he revered, such as Flaubert, Manet, and Leconte de Lisle, demonstrating the significance he attached to this aesthetic statement. Despite Hugo’s pivotal role, he received only a letter of thanks, without an inscribed copy of “their” work. Examination under ultraviolet light has since uncovered a dedication originally addressed to him “in testimony of admiration,” later scraped and overwritten with a palimpsest to M. Gélis. This erasure and rewriting symbolises the complex love-hate rapport the poets maintained over a lifetime.

It is through this copy, presented to “his friend Paul Meurice,” that Baudelaire chose to acknowledge the Hugo circle for this extraordinary literary encounter. Baudelaire and Hugo’s Théophile Gautier is, beneath its apparent modesty, a dual manifesto of two great currents of poetry: Baudelaire’s L’Albatros versus Hugo’s Ultima verba. While “the giant wings [of the former] prevent him from walking,” the latter “remains outlawed, determined to stand tall.”

And if there's only two left, it'll be these two!