Les Fleurs du Mal

The first contract for Les Fleurs du Mal was signed between the parties on 30 December 1856, with Baudelaire committing to deliver his manuscript by 20 January of the following year. He did not do so until February, and the volume went on sale on 25 June 1857, published by Auguste Poulet-Malassis, since Baudelaire’s regular publisher, Michel Lévy — who had just published Baudelaire’s translation of Poe’s Histoires extraordinaires — had refused to publish the collection for fear of prosecution.

That prosecution duly followed in July, when the poet was summoned before the examining magistrate. As early as the start of summer, Gustave Bourdin had opened fire in Le Figaro, denouncing the book’s obsession with the loathsome and the repulsive, calling it “a hospital open to every madness of the mind and every putridity of the heart.” Jules Habans followed a week later, on 12 July, in the same paper, describing the book as leaving the reader with “a great sadness and a horrible fatigue.”

The day before, sensing what was coming, Baudelaire wrote to Poulet-Malassis: “Quickly, hide, but hide the whole edition well.” The publisher accordingly concealed part of the print run before binding. A month later, the criminal court, acting through Deputy Imperial Prosecutor Ernest Pinard (who had already secured Flaubert’s conviction over Madame Bovary a few months earlier), condemned the book “for offense against public morals and decency” and ordered the suppression of six poems: Les Bijoux (pp. [52]–53), Le Léthé (pp. [73]–74), À celle qui est trop gaie (pp. [91]–93), Lesbos (pp. [187]–190), Femmes damnées (pp. [196]–197) and Les Métamorphoses du vampire (pp. [206]–207).

Poulet-Malassis, drawing on the unbound stock, had 230 copies mutilated and recased with cancel leaves — a “ridiculous surgical operation,” as Baudelaire put it, complaining that the cancels had been executed without his consent (letter to Poulet-Malassis, 5 October 1857). The condemned poems were not rehabilitated until 1949, following action by the Société des Gens de Lettres and a ruling of the Cour de Cassation.

Baudelaire’s obsessive care in correcting proofs is well documented. Poulet-Malassis, often exasperated during the four months that felt to him like a century, once wrote to him: “My dear Baudelaire, I am beginning to think you are having me on, which I have in no way deserved!” Despite Baudelaire’s vigilance, a misprint slipped through on the very first press run: in the poem Bénédiction, on page 12, “s’enhardissent” for “s’enhardissant” — an error corrected on the press early in the printing. Copies with the uncorrected reading are the only ones that can properly be called the very first printing. Our copy has this error corrected.

Other supposed “first-printing” errors have long been claimed, notably the word “Feurs” for “Fleurs” in the running head on pp. 31 and 108; page 45 misnumbered as 44; and “captieux” for “capiteux” on the first line of page 201. Baudelaire himself noticed further misprints as he distributed copies, correcting up to eight errors in pencil on the dedication leaf and on pages 29, 43, 110 and 217 of some fifteen copies known to have been corrected by hand by the poet. These errors, however, were never corrected on the press: they occur throughout the entire print run of Les Fleurs du Mal and cannot serve to establish a printing chronology. Let it be said once and for all: these “errors” are present in every copy of the book.

There are, however, two genuine elements that do allow a printing chronology to be established: the text of the Avertissement and that of the title page, both corrected during the print run.

Avertissement:

Four elements were successively altered during printing (no doubt because it was easier for the publisher to intervene in a text of his own composition). The first state shows:

– “Les Éditeurs,” with an accent later dropped;
– A large space before the comma following “Ils poursuivront”;
– “toutes contrefaçons et toutes traductions,” later changed to “toutes contrefaçons et traductions”;
– “Les traités,” not yet capitalized (“Traités”).

These elements were corrected progressively, so successive states exist with one, two, three, then all four corrected.

Title page:

The reference to Agrippa d’Aubigné’s text, quoted for the dedication on the title page, ends without a final period and without a closing parenthesis after “Les Tragiques, liv. II.”

This double error is corrected in the majority of copies. Our copy contains all these faulty, princeps readings, which places it early in the printing sequence — after the correction of “s’enhardissant,” certainly, but before any of the other known corrections.

It is hardly surprising, under these circumstances, that the copy was entrusted to the renowned bindery of Chambolle-Duru, even lacking its wrappers — already, at the time, a drawback. René Victor Chambolle and Hippolyte Duru formed their partnership in 1861, when their joint signature began to appear on bindings. Duru soon ceased active work, leaving Chambolle sole master of the workshop from 1863 until his death in 1898; his son René Chambolle then continued the business, still under the joint signature, until his own death in October 1915.

This characteristically Jansenist design first appears on a copy of Les Épaves (1866), which opens with a celebrated frontispiece drawn and engraved by Félicien Rops. That copy — the Armand Godoy copy — contained a previously unrecorded state of the frontispiece depicting a stylized skeleton-tree, an idea Baudelaire had proposed as early as 1859 and had “dreamed of” for the second edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (1861), as he wrote to Nadar in May 1859, describing “an arborescent skeleton, the legs and ribs forming the trunk, the arms outstretched in a cross blossoming into leaves and buds, sheltering rows of poisonous plants in small staggered pots as in a gardener’s greenhouse.” For that copy, Victor Chambolle created a doublure decorated with a blind-tooled design reproducing this “skeleton-trunk” motif, strictly identical to the one found here.

Subsequently, four copies of Les Fleurs du Mal were treated in the same manner, almost certainly much later, once the collection had achieved wider literary renown — probably at the end of the nineteenth century:

• a copy in black morocco, tan doublure with the blind “skeleton-trunk” design (the Robert Hoe copy, certainly ordered by him in 1897), with its wrappers but without the spine;

• a copy in red morocco, brown doublure with the blind “skeleton-trunk” design (the Pierre Duché copy), with wrappers and spine;

• a copy in black morocco, brown doublure with the blind “skeleton-trunk” design (no known provenance), with wrappers and spine;

• a copy in brown morocco, light brown doublure with the blind “skeleton-trunk” design (our copy, no known provenance), without wrappers or spine.

It is likely that the Épaves copy was the original, matrix copy, for obvious reasons. Later, as Baudelaire’s fame and that of Les Fleurs du Mal grew, the Chambolle-Duru workshop was called upon to produce these few further copies, for which the presence of the “skeleton-trunk” motif made sense among first-printing copies (the Hoe and Duché copies bear the princeps error on p. 12; the other two have it corrected).

Other works by Baudelaire were bound by Chambolle-Duru: Jules Noilly and Jules Le Petit each entrusted them with a copy on Hollande paper of the Œuvres; Edmond Texier his inscribed copy of Les Fleurs; and Poulet-Malassis gave them Baudelaire’s manuscript of Mon cœur mis à nu.

Full morocco bindings, often executed much later, remain rare on the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. Comparable copies are chiefly the work of renowned workshops such as Victor Champs, Trautz-Bauzonnet, Capé, or, for later examples, Meunier or Marius Michel. Only one strictly contemporary full-morocco binding is known: the one Baudelaire commissioned from Lortic for Gustave Chaix d’Est-Ange. The others are half-bindings (another full binding by Lortic, for Asselineau, was broken up and replaced by a binding by Marius Michel in 1906).

Our copy was almost certainly bound in the 1890s, at the latest around the turn of the century, and later placed in a fine cigar-case slipcase by Loutrel.

Catalogue BnF, Charles Baudelaire, Exposition organisée pour le centenaire des Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1957, no. 266 et sq.; En français dans le texte, 1990, no. 276; R. Desprechins, “Récapitulation de mes commentaires sur l’édition originale des Fleurs du Mal” in Le Livre et l’Estampe, 1967, nos. 51/52, p. 204 et sq.; (R. Desprechins, Le Livre et l’Estampe, 1967, nos. 51–52, revised version of that of 1966 used by the 1976 Carteret reprint from Le Véxin français); L. Carteret, Les Trésors du bibliophile, I, p. 118; M. Clouzot, Guide du bibliophile français, p. 43; André Guyaux, Baudelaire. Un demi-siècle de lectures des Fleurs du mal (1855–1905), Paris, PUPS, 2007; Launay, Bulletin du bibliophile, 1979, IV, pp. 523–526; Oberlé, Auguste Poulet-Malassis, no. 212 et sq.; Vicaire, I, col. 342; Jean-Claude Vrain, Charles Baudelaire, no. 12 et sq.