La Bonne Chanson

La Bonne Chanson is Paul Verlaine’s fourth collection of verse, published in 1870 in Paris at the author’s expense by Alphonse Lemerre. A short sequence composed between winter 1869 and spring 1870, it brings together twenty-one poems addressed to Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville (aged sixteen), whom Verlaine married on 11 August 1870. Although printing was completed on 12 June 1870, the volume was not actually put on sale until 1872, Lemerre having refused to publish it during the war and the Commune. Verlaine, meanwhile, was already at odds with his young wife: none of the promises of happiness evoked in this Bonne chanson would be kept, and the couple divorced in 1874. A lyric collection par excellence, it celebrates the hope of a new life through Mathilde’s grace and an inner springtime reaching even a “sick” Paris. Victor Hugo, who received a copy, praised the work with a famous image: “a flower in a grenade.”

Gabriel Fauré would draw from it, between 1892 and 1894, a cycle of nine songs under the same title.

Hermine David’s (1886–1970) aesthetic reading here matches the limpid fervor of the cycle dedicated to Mathilde: slender figures, supple lines, faces in half-tones.

A very fine copy, the artist’s own, enriched with delicate signed and heightened prints.

Carteret, Illustrés, IV, 392.