Le Livre, objet d’art : collection Calouste-Gulbenkian. France, xixe-xxe siècles. Catalogue de l’exposition présentée au Centre culturel Calouste-Gulbenkian, Paris, 13 mars-29 mai 1997. Notices de Manuela Fidalgo, introduction par Antoine Coron. Lisbonne, Musée Calouste-Gulbenkian, 1997, 175 p., ill. en couleurs.
From the first important monograph on Marie-Christine Desjardins, better known under the name of Madame de Villedieu, published by Emile Magne in 1909, until the recent « Pléiade », volume of Nouvelles du xviie siècle in 1997, there seems to be a mystery about Les Désordres de l’amour. M. Lever’s Ré...
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Français |
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2000
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| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | From the first important monograph on Marie-Christine Desjardins, better known
under the name of Madame de Villedieu, published by Emile Magne in 1909, until
the recent « Pléiade », volume of Nouvelles du xviie siècle in 1997, there seems to be a
mystery about Les Désordres de l’amour. M. Lever’s Répertoire bibliographique of French
prose fiction of the 17th century records three copies of a 1675-1676 edition which
have turned out to belong to quite different imprints.
This article first discusses some questions brought up by the modern Mme de
Villedieu-specialist Micheline Cuénin, who supposed that the date of 1675 on the
tide-page of the only volume known of the French first impression could be a printing error, just as the author’s name « M. » instead of « Madame » de Villedieu.
Furthermore, Claude Barbin, the famous Parisian publisher of the novel, might have
stopped selling his own edition in favour of the Elzevier-publishers at Brussels. The
obvious failure of a hundred years’ bibliographical search for early separate editions
in France could be attributed to personal reasons of the author herself.
Systematic investigations in French and other European libraries (with detailed
questionnaire and request for photocopies of title-pages and printing ornaments)
produced a quite unexpected result: in France there have been at least four different editions published around 1676. From the original four-volume Barbin edition,
published in November 1675, three complete and three incomplete copies still exist — five of these outside France, in Austrian and German libraries possessing the
bound books of royal or scholarly stocks. Three one-volume editions (with the same
Barbin address and an identical number of pages) examined by means of the
« bibliographie matérielle » based on studies like R. A. Sayce’s famous Compositorial
practices and the localization of printed books, are clearly rare: two of them, pirate editions published at Lyons and Toulouse respectively, are represented by a single copy
at Rouen and Montpellier; the third one, a Lyons’ reprint of the first, can be looked
at in four libraries outside of France. On the other hand, there remain at least ten
copies, spread all over Europe, of the famous Elzevier edition of 1676. A second
French edition with « privilège », published by J. Amaulry in 1686 at Lyons, is extremely rare. Finally, there have been found a dozen copies of « J. Guerrier, Lyon,
1697 ». Here once more, we have two different imprints, the second one published
at the earliest in 1712, the distribution being different. Last but not least, the
Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart keeps a small edition without place or
date printed at Lyons as well.
The fact that in Parisian libraries there cannot be found one of these early editions
is not at all a special case and does not allow any speculations on diffusion — or not
— in the 17th century. Little novels or love-stories were seldom bound and put into
libraries. They were read, given away to friends, lost. Book collectors and even great
libraries were only interested in novels of very famous authors and titles. No French
bibliography of rare books has ever dealt with Mme de Villedieu. In foreign countries, however, it was regarded as chic, prestigious, to have the latest Parisian novelties, to be able to show them to one’s friends. Thus the name of Barbin and the date
of the first edition even on the title-pages of the Elzeviers in the Netherlands. A certain number of these books have been acquired by or given to foreign libraries. And
therefore any further bibliographical research should be done on a European level
(the NUC presenting for a long time localization of the American stocks), in the
libraries themselves, by application of the methods of « bibliographie matérielle ».
The real lover of books is she or he who does not neglect even an unspectacular
pirate- or a modest no name no date-imprint which represents the last traces of an
edition which, without her or his attention, we would never have known. He or she
can be a true bibliophile or a librarian. |
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