Léon BLOY (1846 – 1917)

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Lot n° 96
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Léon BLOY (1846 – 1917)
Belluaires et Porchers. Paris, Stock, 1905. In-12 of XLI, 351, (1) pp. half red morocco with corners, spine ribbed with title and date in gilt letters, untrimmed, gilt head, cover and spine kept (Alix). First edition. One of the fifteen numbered copies on Japon, the only large paper, n° 10, initialed by the publisher. Photographic portraits of Léon Bloy and Ernest Hello, here in double state, and facsimile of writing of the latter. The work is essentially composed of articles published from May 1884 to May 1892, notably in Le Chat noir, Le Figaro and La Plume, including Le cabanon de Prométhée (La Plume, September 1890), an eulogy of Lautréamont, whom Bloy was the first to consider as a major writer. Added to this, in the Introduction, a reflection on Art and Beauty, which is perhaps one of his most beautiful pages, in the Epilogue a call for the arrival of new priests to save the world from decay, and finally, the resumption of two pamphlets, Ici on assassine les grands hommes (Here we assassinate great men) and Un brelan d'excommuniés (A clutch of excommunicated men), this last text devoted to three bellicose men, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Ernest Hello and Paul Verlaine. Attached, mounted at the top, the corrected autograph minute of a letter addressed by Bloy to the Belgian lawyer Henry Carton de Wiart, dated August 19, 1897 (one page in-8), taking him to task about the manuscript of the Introduction de Belluaires et Porchers. In 1888, Bloy had written this introductory chapter for the work he was planning to have published under the title of Belluaires et Bouviers and he sent the manuscript, for all practical purposes, to one of his admirers, the young Belgian lawyer Henry Carton de Wiart. The latter, elected deputy in 1896, "thought he would please Léon Bloy by publishing this unpublished work in the Catholic review Durandal, one of the organs of social Christianity of which he was one of the most brilliant representatives" (M. Bardèche, Léon Bloy). Very irritated by this initiative taken without his authorization, Bloy replied with this scathing letter which he made public by publishing it, first in a small review, La Trêve-Dieu, and then in the Mendiant ingrat (page 366 of the original edition): "Sir, I am being made to read in the foolish review Durandal, the "Introduction" of Belluaires et Porchers, of which I gave you the autograph manuscript, 9 years ago, when I thought you were a friend [....] This very Belgian low hand on the good of the poor borders on swindle, in the sense that I am deprived by it of an unpublished work which could one day or another be profitable to me, and I did not know that you were at this point ". The ironic answer of Carton de Wiart was published by Joseph Bollery in his biography of Léon Bloy. From the Daniel Sicklès library (IV, 1990, n° 1062).
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