Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Chronologie des livres de Victor Hugo imprimes en France entre 1819 et 1851

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knu192

1468-2931

P. W. M. Cogman,

French Literature and Critical Theory

In his enthusiastic preface, which includes a witty parody of L'Âne, Jean-Marc Hovasse judges Victor Hugo's books published before his exile as of the most interest to bibliographers, going from the Romantic works, often illustrated (by Achille Devéria, Louis Boulanger, the Johannot brothers), to the flurry of collected political and social speeches of 1850–51. The chronology of their publication, however, has remained problematic, despite previous work by Georges Vicaire (1890–1900), Léopold Carteret (1924–27), Marcel Clouzot (1996), and the articles of Flavien Michaux (1931–39). Éric Bertin demonstrates that these authors, and the sales catalogues relying on their work, are contradictory, confusing, and unreliable. Dates — on covers, of completion of printing, of putting on sale, of featuring in the Bibliographie de la France (BF) — can diverge by up to a year (the first edition of Cromwell, announced in the BF on 5 December 1827, bears 1828 on the title page); separate editions can bear the phrase ‘première édition’. Bertin's Chronologie records, after the title of the work, a citation (where available, or one following the same format) from the BF, which provides the basis for the dating; observations and corrections; supplementary references (from other periodicals and contemporary correspondence); a selection of copies sold (from auction, booksellers' and exhibition catalogues) or in private collections (including Bertin's extensive library), with details of paper (if rare), cover, and envois where available, enabling the reader to trace the provenance of some copies (the history of Les Orientales with an autograph manuscript stanza of ‘Sara la baigneuse’ (no. 30, p. 141) sent to Jules Janin can be followed from 1877 down to 1955); and a selection of copies in public collections (including the Oxford Bodleian and Taylor Institution), with classmarks in the case of Tolbiac and the Maison Victor Hugo de Paris. Bertin's work magisterially disentangles the sequence of the seven initial editions of Odes et ballades and the nine of Les Orientales (six in the first year, but no known fourth, with the fifth appearing between the first and the second). Future librarians, booksellers, and bibliophiles will be able to distinguish the two ‘éditions premières’ of Le Rhin in 1842 (in the second, inter alia, the subtitles ‘Tome premier’ and ‘Tome second’ become ‘Tome i’ and ‘Tome ii’). But the Chronologie is no arid listing. Details of when prefaces and notes were inserted into editions (we can find when Hugo inserted remarks about Juliette Drouet into Lucrèce Borgia) are meticulously recorded; all known envois are indexed: over a hundred individuals figure. There are intriguing uncertainties: is ‘Job aux pieds de Judith’ on the first edition of Les Burgraves for Judith Gautier? Other notes offer glimpses into contemporary attitudes: an indignant letter to Furne castigates the publisher for sending a prospectus for a new edition of Hugo's Œuvres: ‘J'ai […] des enfans chez moi, des filles, une femme: vous concevrez sans doute avec quel soin il m'importe d’éloigner les écrits d'un homme aussi fou, aussi divers, aussi impudique que le paraît votre auteur dans ses ellucubrations [sic]' (p. 147).