BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (Jules). - Lot 75

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Lot n° 75
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BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (Jules). - Lot 75
BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (Jules). Letters to Léon Bloy. Paris, Société du Mercure de France, 1902. In-12 of 240 pp, (4) ff, bradel half eggplant morocco with corners, smooth spine with title and date (by mistake, 1913) in gilt letters, gilt head, untrimmed, cover and spine preserved, case (Stroobants). First edition, decorated with a portrait of Barbey on his deathbed and a facsimile of a letter from the writer. Extraordinary personal copy of Léon Bloy, one of the seven first copies numbered on Hollande, the only large paper edition, n° 1, copiously annotated by him. Enriched with a title page nicely calligraphed on strong paper by him in gothic letters with flowery initial, it bears under the justification this poignant autograph note : I certify that this copy was mine and that I kept it for my children, until the day when misery forced me to sell it for a few crusts of bread - with despair. September 1st, 1905. Léon Bloy. Léon Bloy has covered the margins - preserved intact - of his copy with numerous autograph notes, most of which are characteristic of the virulence of his judgments: "I have seen few souls as small as that of Saint-Bonnet"; "Alexandre Dumas, one of the silliest men of the 19th century"; Fustel de Coulanges, "a dreadful cuistre"; the "pitiful Coppée, a doddering poet of the Grève des Forgerons [.who must have dropped in his chamber pot" the illuminated copy of the introduction to Les Diaboliques (which Bloy had given to Barbey and which Coppée had inherited). More rarely, Barbey himself does not escape, post mortem, the arrows of the polemicist: "Never a man has forgotten as much as him"; "Never a man was less regular, less exact and less solid than the poor d'Aurevilly"; and, echoing an evocation of the latter: "The ass, the stone, the human spirit, poor meditation tools. One must have known d'A. to feel the misery of the soul expressed in these few lines". Four letters addressed by Bloy to Barbey are retranscribed, two of them in their entirety, including the remarkable one of February 23, 1876, covering the margins of 13 pages, in which he relates a spat with the journalist Chantrel, guilty of a bad review of Le Prêtre marié. From the Serrier library (2001, n° 300).
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