First definitive editions, partly original.
Bound in red half-shagreen with corners, spine with four raised bands decorated with blind-stamped panels and fillets, the entwined monogram of Jules Hetzel at the foot, uncut copy, contemporary binding.
A few occasional spots of foxing.
Inscribed by the author to Jules Hetzel, “as a token of the author’s friendship.”
In the 1840s, Balzac “contributed to a collective volume illustrated with Grandville’s vignettes, Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, issued in parts by a new publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), who was to become a friend and play a crucial role in the consortium of publishers of La Comédie humaine. [Balzac] also assisted Hetzel in drafting texts signed ‘P.-J. Stahl,’ the publisher’s pseudonym.” (Roger Pierrot, Honoré de Balzac, Paris, Fayard, 1994)
An outstanding copy, inscribed by Balzac, in a charming contemporary binding.
Autograph letter signed in black ink, addressed to his mother and dated “Sunday morning the 14th.” A few underlinings, deletions and corrections by the author.
Formerly in the collection of Armand Godoy, n°188.
A fading Baudelaire: “The state of disgust in which I find myself makes everything seem even worse.”
Drawn by the promise of epic fame, Baudelaire went to Belgium in April 1864 for a few conferences and in the hope of a fruitful meeting with the publishers of Les Misérables, Lacroix and Verboeckhoven. The meeting didn't happen, the conferences were a failure and Baudelaire felt boundless resentment for “Poor Belgium”. Nonetheless, despite numerous calls to return to France, the poet would spend the rest of his days in this much-castigated country, living the life of a melancholic bohemian. Aside from a few short stays in Paris, Baudelaire, floored by a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side, would only return to France on 29 June 1866 for a final year of silent agony in a sanatorium.
Written barely a few months after his arrival in Brussels and his initial disappointments, this letter shows us all the principal elements of the mysterious and passionate hatred that would keep the poet definitively in Belgium.
In his final years in France, exhausted by the trial of The Flowers of Evil, humiliated by the failure of his candidacy to the Académie Française, a literary orphan after the bankruptcy of Poulet-Malassis and disinherited as an author by the sale of his translation rights to Michel Lévy, Baudelaire was above all deeply moved by the inevitable decline of Jeanne Duval, his enduring love, while his passion for la Présidente had dried up, her poetic perfection not having withstood the prosaic experience of physical possession. Thus, on 24 April 1864, he decided to flee these “decomposing loves”, of which he could keep only the “form and the divine essence.”
Belgium, so young as a country and seemingly born out of a Francophone Romantic revolution against the Dutch financial yoke, presented itself to the poet phantasmagorically as a place where his own modernity might be acknowledged. A blank page on which he wanted to stamp the power of his language while affirming his economic independence, Belgium was a mirror onto which Baudelaire projected his powerful ideal, but one that would send him tumbling even more violently into the spleen of his final disillusionment.
Published in the Revue de Paris in November 1917, without the sensitive passage about his cold enemas, this emblematic letter evokes all of Baudelaire's work as poet, writer, artist and pamphleteer. The first such reference is via the reassuring, mentor-like figure of the publisher of The Flowers of Evil, Poulet-Malassis: “If I was not so far from him, I really think I'd end up paying so I could take my meals at his.” This is followed by a specific reference to the “venal value” of his Aesthetic Curiosities: “all these articles that I so sadly wrote on painting and poetry” . Baudelaire then confides in his mother his hopes for his latest translations of Poe which, to his great frustration “are not getting published by L'Opinion, La Vie Parisienne, or in Le Monde illustré”. He concludes with his Belgian Letters, which Jules Hetzel had just told him had been, after negotiations with Le Figaro, “received with great pleasure.” Nonetheless, as Baudelaire literally underlined, they were “only to be published when I come back to France.”
His perennially imminent return to France is a leitmotiv of his Belgian correspondence: “Certainly, I think I'll go to Paris on Thursday.” It is nonetheless always put off (“I'm putting off going to Paris until the end of the month”, he corrects himself eight days later), and it seems to stoke up the poet's ferocity towards his new fellow citizens, Baudelaire taking pleasure in actively spreading the worst kinds of rumors about them (involving espionage, parricide, cannibalism, pederasty and other licentious activities. “Tired of always being believed, I put about the rumor that I had killed my father and eaten him... and they believed me! I'm swimming in disgrace like a fish through water.” “Poor Belgium”, in Œuvres complètes, II p. 855)
This eminently poetic attempt to explore the depths of despair in covering himself in hatred is perhaps most clearly seen through his sharing of his culinary difficulties with his “dear, dear mother”, the only sustaining figure who gave him “more than [he]'d expected”.
Read together with some of the finest pages of The Flowers of Evil, this excessive attention to the miseries of his palate reveal far more than simple culinary fussiness.
It is also hardly innocent that Baudelaire begins his recriminations with an exhaustive rejection of all food, with one notable exception: “Everything is bad, save for wine”. This assertion is clearly not without reference to the “vegetal ambrosia”, that sanctified elixir in so many of his poems and above all a friend in misery, which drowns out the poet's sublime crime. “None can understand me. Did one /Among all those stupid drunkards / Ever dream in his morbid nights / Of making a shroud of wine?”.
“Bread is bad”. If wine is the incorruptible soul of a poet, bread, here underlined by the author, is his innocent and mortal flesh. “In the bread and wine intended for their mouths / They mix ashes and impure spit”, as Baudelaire says in Benediction. This is the poet-child who everywhere, in hotels, restaurants, English taverns, “suffers from this impossible communion of elements and thus presents his mother with an even more symbolic vision of his misery”.
Nonetheless, the man is always present, his carnal desires hidden beneath the misery of his condition. “Meat is not bad in itself. It becomes bad in the manner of its cooking.” How can we not, behind the apparently prosaic nature of this culinary comment, recognize the most permanent of Baudelaire's metaphors, present throughout the poet's work – A Carcass, To She Who is Too Gay, A Martyr, Women Doomed – the female body transformed by death?
“The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,
And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined”
“People who live at home live less badly,” he continues, but Baudelaire doesn't want to be comforted and his complaining is nothing but an expression of the perfect correlations between his physical condition and this final poetical experience.
Of course, Belgium was not really to blame, but it was only to his mother that Baudelaire could make this rare and moving confession: “I must say, by the by, that the state of disgust in
which I find myself makes everything seem even worse.”
Essentially, all the aggression he was to pour out on these cursed kinspeople was nothing but the echo of an older rancor that, in 1863, consumed his “heart laid bare.” To his mother's recriminations at finding her son's notes, Baudelaire replied, on 5 June: “Well! Yes, this much-wished for book will be a book of recriminations...I will turn on the whole of France my very real talent for impertinence. I need revenge like a tired man needs his bath.”
The “cold laudanum enemas” of Belgium were to be that bath for the tired poet, who found an occasion to combat, with a supreme wrath, this existential “disgust”. In the middle of a paragraph – the very one that would be cut by the Revue Française – Baudelaire attributes this, without naming the disease, to syphilis: “What is insupportable in these intestinal and stomach complaints is the physical weakness and the spiritual sadness that result from them.”
Madame Aupick's immediate concern at these all too sudden confidences led Baudelaire to lie to her about his actual state of health, which continued to get worse. Hence, in his following letter: “It was terribly wrong of me to talk to you about my Belgian health, since it affected you so deeply...Generally speaking, I'm in excellent health...That I have a few little problems...so what? That is the general lot. As for my trouble, I can only repeat that I have seen other Frenchmen suffer the same way, being unable to adapt to this vicious climate...And in any case, I won't be staying long.”
A superb autograph letter from a son to his mother, subtly revealing the poetical reasons for his final self-imposed exile, the inverted mirror of the first, enforced, wandering of his youth in the Mascarene Islands, the writer's only two voyages.
If the young man could somehow – we don't know how – escape to the far-off Reunion island, the old man nonetheless didn't dare leave Belgium, which was so close, and this melancholic letter augured the end of his days spent by the North Sea, as somber as his initial trip to the South Seas had been bright.
First edition, one of 75 numbered copies on couleurs surfine paper, ours being one of 25 containing the three aquatints by Mimi Parent retouched in watercolor which she signed and justified, deluxe copy.
Autograph inscription signed by José Pierre to Paul Aveline.
Signatures of José Pierre and Mimi Parent below the justification page.
Work illustrated with 3 aquatints by Mimi Parent.
Spine very lightly sunned without gravity, otherwise handsome copy.
The complete original manuscript of one of Sade's first works, ruled in pencil throughout, comprising 40 leaves written recto and verso. This manuscript, like the other extant items from the Marquis, was dictated to a scribe and corrected by Sade himself.
Contemporary green paper wrappers with a small lack to middle of spine. Ink title, partly erased, to upper cover: 9/ Net et corrigé en août 1808 – bon brouillon. Les Antiquaires. Comédie en prose en 1 acte [Copied and corrected August 1808 – a good draft. The Antiquaries. A prose comedy in 1 Act]. This title is repeated on the verso of the upper cover.
Numerous manuscript corrections, annotations and deletions in Sade's hand, principally adding blocking, and rich in both stage and acting directions.
Written in 1776 and re-copied at Charenton in 1808, and most likely augmented at the time with various topical references – notably including an allusion to Napoleon, “of whom he was hoping, in vain, to receive permission to leave the asylum at Charenton as a free man” (p.94) – Les Antiquaires is one of the first theatrical pieces written by the Marquis and therefore one of his first literary works overall, written eight years before the Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribond [Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man].
Though the precise dating of these pieces is made difficult due to the lack of the original manuscripts, several clues have allowed bibliographers to date the initial composition of this piece to 1776, possibly with a corrected version during the Revolution and a few final changes at the time of this last edit, which is today the only extant manuscript of this play.
These clues include the status of the Jewish and English characters, the style of the dialogues, and Sade's correspondence with theatres; the strongest clue being biographical in nature.
Les Antiquaires can essentially be considered the true “theatrical version” of Sade's Voyage en Italie with which it shows a sustained intertextuality.
The play is about an antiquary – in the 18th century sense of the term, which is to say a learned devotee of Classical culture – who wants to marry off his daughter to a friend with the same passion, who nonetheless finds a way of convincing him to let her marry her young lover.
Whether it be in the learned dialogues of the antiquaries or in their eccentric parody by the young lover imitating them, Sade draws upon his own experience and observations from his travels, which he expands or twists, according to the viewpoint of his various characters. Hence, the description of Mount Etna by the lover – Delcour – is a parody of Sade's detailed description of the Pietra Malla volcano, and the made-up “subterranean tunnel linking Etna to America” is directly inspired by the tunnel of the Crypta Neapolitana, described by Sade in his Voyage. The Marquis would reach back to this same experience of volcanoes in one of the most famous scenes in his Histoire de Juliette.
Barely returned from his latest grand tour and almost at the same time as writing his passionate and detailed account of the experience, Sade was thus also writing a satirical version of his own work (until his problems with the military authorities). The work is at the same time a social critique of pointless erudition and a self-mockery of his own passion for history and of his “zeal to see everything, his insatiable curiosity” (cf. Maurice Lever, preface to Voyage en Italie).
This virulent satire is paradoxically twinned with a very erudite display of the author's knowledge of the latest architectural discoveries and the major contemporary questions in the field.
This was, in fact, the element criticized by the two heads of theatres to whom Sade sent the play for consideration, most likely during 1791 or 1792: “The work is well-written. It shows the author's spirit and depth of knowledge, but it's too serious, too scientific” (Théâtre du Palais-Royal); “Less display of knowledge, more ridicule...would be needed to stage Les Antiquaires. The author, who shows himself very learned, is bound to come round to this idea himself” (Théâtre de Bondi).
Though it seems that the version critiqued above was only an initial iteration and that Sade took into account these comments and corrected the faults in the surviving work, it would appear that the critiques arose from a failure to understand what makes this piece special.
For, despite a very traditional structure of an inter-generational conflict pitting an obtuse, obsessive, and naïve father against a quixotic and free-spirited youth, the play does not come down one way or the other in judgment and the older characters are not, in the end, fooled by the tricks and stratagems of the young couple, who themselves end up conceding their elders a certain amount of authority and respect for their knowledge.
As the play is heavily inspired by Molière, it is as a worthy heir of Diderot's that Sade presents this new battle between the Ancients and the Moderns, which is to say the antiquary versus the philosopher, as described by Jean Seznec in his Essais sur Diderot et l'Antiquité [Essays on Diderot and Antiquity].
D'Alembert, in his preliminary discourse in the Encyclopedia, takes a definite position on this issue: “That is why, being of unequal merit, a Scholar is far less useful than a Philosopher.” Diderot, more restrained, lists in the article on “erudition” the boons and limits of the two intellectual positions. It's clearly this heritage with which the young Sade claims communion, and his play shows “the paradoxes of this debate with an irresistible satirical virtuosity” (S. Dangeville). The author defines his position in the battle between the antiquaries and the philosophers through the figure of Delcourt: “Eh mais vraiment il me serait difficile de passer pour un [savant]. J'ai pu acquérir toutes les connaissances d'un homme de mon état, sans néanmoins avoir étudié les sciences que Monsieur votre Père et ses amis cultivent depuis si longtemps.” [“Ah, but really, it would be difficult to call myself a scholar. I've managed to pick up all the knowledge fit for a man of my station without ever having studied the sciences that your noble father and his friends have been cultivating so long.”]
The response of the maid, Cornaline, demonstrates on her part a conscious freedom when faced with the erudition that seems both to herald and outline the atypical philosophy and perversion of the values of the future author of the 120 Days of Sodom: “Fussiez-vous vous-même aussi profond qu'eux, je ne veux pas que vous le paraissiez; battez la campagne, faites des anachronismes, petit à petit on se méfiera de vous, on soupçonnera du mystère et de là même naitre et l'instant de vous dévoiler et la nécessité de ne plus feindre.” [“If you yourself were as profound as they, I would not have you seem it; daydreaming, stuck in anachronisms, one would soon start to mistrust you, suspecting you of some secret and thus a need to unmask yourself and no longer have to feign something you are not.”]
This analogy of excess to the point of disbelief, still limited in 1776 to the field of knowledge, could very well have been the basis for a philosophy that would develop during the apocalyptic upheavals, of a need to “unmask [ourselves] and no longer have to feign something [we] are not”.
This first literary exploit, whose importance Gilbert Lely played down, in actual fact shows an author who is far more experienced than he seems at first sight. Certainly, as Sylvie Dangeville points out, Les Antiquaires clearly belongs to the young Marquis' ‘apprenticeship' in writing for the theatre. She cites by way of example the very powerful influence of the Fourberies de Scapin, the Malade Imaginaire and the Femmes Savantes on the action of Les Antiquaires.
Nonetheless, let us not forget that Sade drew only very slightly on the dramatic structure of these plays, and much more heavily – to excess, once again! – on the comic potential of situations.
In presenting to the audience characters hidden in sacks and beaten, lovers springing up out of crates about to be burned and predatory women (“Un loup dans mon enfance se jeta sur moi et depuis lors j'entre quelque fois dans des accès de fureur; je crois que je vous dévorerais, Monsieur [A wolf attacked me in my youth and since then I occasionally have fits of fury; I think I will eat you up, Monsieur].”), Sade is already and entirely Sade.
Provenance: family archives.
