Baudelaire, Charles | "You know him, reader, this delicate monster, — Hypocrite reader, — my likeness, — my brother!"

Baudelaire, Charles

Les Fleurs du mal. Paris: Poulet-Malassis et de Broise, 1857

12mo (189 x 123 mm). Inscribed on the half-title, title-page in red and black, dedication leaf, running title with "Feurs" misprint on p.31 and p.108, p.45 misnumbered 44, "captieux" misprint on p.201, with the six pièces condamnées, publisher's yellow printed wrappers (second state, with the five typographical faults uncorrected and with the price of 3F. on the backstrip) bound in, facsimiles of lower wrappers (states A and B) and a printed note regarding Vicaire's research into the states bound in at end; stray spots, three marginal closed tears to "La Vin" title, minor creases and tiny edge tears to last three leaves. In later crushed brown morocco by L. Peeters of Antwerp, spine with raised bands in 6 compartments, second and sixth gilt lettered, inside dentelles gilt, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers. Housed in a marbled slipcase.

Association copy of the first edition, first issue of Baudelaire's masterpiece.

The inscription on the half-title reads, "à M. Hostein, en lui demandant encore un peu de patience, Ch. Baudelaire." Hippolyte Hostein was a writer and the director of the Théâtre de la Gaîté in Paris from 1849 to 1858. Baudelaire had proposed a play to Hostein—a melodrama based on his poem "Le Vin de l'assassin"—where a worker kills his wife so that he can descend into drink without interruption or criticism. The part of the wife was meant for Marie Daubrun, an actress at the Gaîté with whom Baudelaire had fallen in love. Baudelaire never wrote the play, and perhaps he sent this book as an apology for still not producing his text (see F.W.J. Hemmings, Baudelaire the Damned, 2011).

This first issue is the complete, uncensored edition, including the six pièces condamnées ("Les Bijoux," "Le Léthé," "A celle qui est trop gaie," "Femmes damnées," "Lesbos," and "Les Métamorphoses du vampire") which were ordered to be removed only six weeks or so after publication. Both Baudelaire and the publisher were prosecuted for "outrage aux bonnes moeurs" and ordered to destroy the edition, making any surviving copy of the first issue a rarity, even more so with the publisher's wrappers present. Gustav Flaubert, who had also been prosecuted for Madame Bovary, admired Les fleurs du mal and wrote to Baudelaire, "You have found a way to rejuvenate Romanticism ... You are as unyielding as marble, and as penetrating as an English mist."

Association copies of this work are rare, as are copies preserving the original wrappers—the present volume being an exceptional copy of this masterwork of nineteenth-century poetry.

REFERENCE:

Carteret i, p. 118