Les Fleurs du mal [Flowers of Evil]

Paris, Poulet-Malassis, 1857.
1 vol. (120 x 190 mm) of [2] f. (half-title and title), 248 p. and [2] f. (table). Brown morocco, spine ribbed, gilt title, double fillet on edges, contreplats with violine morocco frame, matching silk endpapers and double marbled paper endpapers, gilt edges on witnesses, preserved covers and spine (binding signed by Noulhac), in black half-box case, gilt title, date at bottom.

First edition.
Early edition, before the corrections to the warning leaf, enriched with a handwritten letter to Champfleury at the beginning of their friendship.

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

Baudelaire signed his first contract for Les Fleurs du mal on December 30, 1856, committing to deliver his manuscript on the following January 20. He did not do so until February. The result was a print run of 23 copies on vergé de Hollande paper, distributed by the author, and 1300 copies on vélin d’Angoulême, put on sale on June 25, 1857. They were printed, published and distributed by Auguste Poulet-Malassis, since Michel Lévy, Baudelaire’s long-standing publisher, who had just published the volumes of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination – translated by the poet – had withdrawn from publishing the collection of Fleurs du mal, for fear of prosecution. Proceedings were indeed brought in July, when the poet was summoned by the examining magistrate. Jules Habans, in Le Figaro, deplored on July 12: “When you close the book after having read it all the way through as I have just done, a great sadness and a horrible weariness remain in the mind. Everything in it that is not hideous is incomprehensible, everything that is comprehensible is putrid, according to the author’s words.” The day before, sensing trouble, the poet wrote to Poulet-Malassis: ‘Quick, hide, indeed hide the entire edition.’ The publisher then concealed part of the print run before binding. A month later, the judgment of the criminal court, through the deputy of the imperial prosecutor Ernest Pinard (who, a few months earlier, had already condemned Flaubert for Madame Bovary) condemned the book “for contempt of public morality and decency” and ordered the removal of six poems: “Les bijoux” (p. [52]-53), “Le Léthé” (pp. [73]-74), “À celle qui est trop gaie” (p. [91]-93), “Lesbos” (pp. [187]-190), “Femmes damnées” (pp. [196]-197) and “Les métamorphoses du vampire” (pp. [206]-207).

230 copies were mutilated and bound in cardboard on the decision of Poulet-Malassis: a “ridiculous surgical operation” according to Baudelaire, who complained about the execution of these cardboards produced without his consent (letter to Poulet-Malassis dated October 5, 1857). The banned pieces were not reinstated until 1949, under the impetus of the Société des Gens de Lettres and a trial before the Court of Cassation. We know the maniacal care that Baudelaire put into correcting the proofs beforehand. Poulet-Malassis, often exasperated, wrote to him in the middle of these four months, which seemed like a century to him: “My dear Baudelaire, I’m beginning to think you’re taking the piss out of me, which is something I in no way deserve”! The poet’s meticulous care did not prevent misprints from appearing in the print run, and the author spotted an error as soon as he took possession of the first copies, in the poem “Bénédiction”, on page 12: “s’enhardissent” for “s’enhardissant” – a mistake – the only one – corrected on the press at the beginning of the print run. These copies are the only ones that can be described as the very first print run. Our copy has this error corrected.

For decades, other errors have been reported, which are characteristic of a first printing: let us mention the most famous ones, such as the word Feurs for Fleurs in the running titles on pages 31 and 108; page 45 which is paginated 44 or the word captieux for capiteux in the first line of page 201. In addition, there are other misprints that Baudelaire spotted as he went along with the copies he gave out, on which he intervened by correcting up to eight errors in lead pencil, on the dedication page and on pages 29, 43, 110, 217. About fifteen copies corrected in this way by his hand are known. But these misprints will be – and remain – all printed: they are found throughout the print run of Fleurs du Mal and cannot be used for establishing a chronology. These “errors” are present in all copies: “copy of the first printing, with errors”, and all the notations of this kind, are therefore not only misleading, but also deceptive. On the other hand, other elements rarely, if ever, mentioned, do allow for a chronology of the printing to be established: errors in the text of the Warning and in that of the title page, which were indeed corrected during the printing. These corrections are the only ones that can support a chronology: * in the Warning, four elements are successively modified (no doubt because it is easier for the publisher to intervene in a text of which he is the editor and which concerns him directly). The first printing includes the following elements:

“Les Éditeurs“ (The Publishers), with an accent that will later disappear; a large space before the comma that follows ‘Ils poursuivront’ (They will pursue); ‘toutes contrefaçons et toutes traductions’ (all counterfeits and all translations), which will later become ‘toutes contrefaçons et traductions’ (all counterfeits and translations); ‘Les traités’ (The Treaties), which does not yet have a capital letter (”Traités”).
These elements are corrected gradually and we therefore find successive states of one, two, three and then four corrected elements.

On the title page: the reference to the text of Agrippa d’Aubigné, for the dedication, ends without a full stop and without closing parentheses after “Les Tragiques, liv. II”. This double error, spotted quite early on, has been corrected in the majority of copies. Our copy contains all these faulty and princeps elements, which places it in an early printing chronology that could be described as the very first edition, notwithstanding the correction to “s’enhardissant” (becoming bolder). This princeps state is one of the rarest, prior to the succession of all the copies that will see these four elements modified over the course of the edition.

Mounted: a beautiful signed autograph letter addressed to Champfleury, written in the summer of 1845. It is the second letter exchanged between the two men. The first, which dates from May 1845, announces Champfleury’s first laudatory article on Baudelaire, for his 1845 Fair. In this second letter, the poet admits to having acted absurdly. Humiliated for his friend and for himself, he nevertheless managed to save Champfleury’s honor and self-respect: “My dear friend, I have made an absurd mess of things. I found myself facing people with a greater insolence than any I have ever known; it is equaled only by their stupidity. I am deeply humiliated, for myself and for you. Your name was enough to draw almost insults; even Monsieur Delange couldn’t resist giving it his two cents’ worth. I am still reeling from the shock. For the rest, you can rest assured. Your honor and your self-respect have been perfectly safeguarded by me. C. B.” A few weeks earlier, the poet had traded two paintings at the Delange art gallery on rue de Trévise and asked his mother, Madame Aupick, to have them delivered to him (cf. Correspondence, I, p. 128). This marked the beginning of a friendship between the two men, which would grow stronger over the years. In 1848, Champfleury said he spent “12 to 15 hours a day” in Baudelaire’s company; and it was thanks to Champfleury, and with him, that he met Poulet-Malassis in 1850 and Eugène Delacroix in 1851. Baudelaire was the first and official proofreader of his Excentriques (1851) and Baudelaire obviously offered him a copy of Les Fleurs du mal, with a dedication that is unfortunately not known: the shipment is not transcribed in the Champfleury sale [Drouot, 1890, no. 687] which only mentions an “author’s shipment” in a cardboard box. The copy has been missing since 1945. A very fine copy in an old binding by Henri Noulhac: born in Châteauroux in 1866, he moved to Paris in 1894, encouraged in “Jansenist” work by Henri Béraldi because, as Fléty tells us, he was neither a bookbinder nor a gilder. A gilder joined him in his workshop in 1900, enabling him to introduce decorations with gilded floral motifs and gilded frames around the silk endpapers into his production, as in this example. His impeccable mastery and the quality of execution of his works make him an indisputable master of the genre; after the war, he would take charge of the technical training of several budding bookbinders, including Rose Adler and Madeleine Gras.

Baudelaire, Correspondence, I, p; 129 (for the letter); BnF Catalog, Charles Baudelaire, Exhibition organized for the centenary of Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris, 1957, n° 266 et seq.; En Français dans le texte, 1990, n° 276; R. Desprechins, “Récapitulation de mes commentaires sur l’édition originale des Fleurs du mal” in Le Livre et l’Estampe, 1967, no. 51/52, p. 204 ff.; 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 seq.; Vicaire, vol. I, column 342; Jean-Claude Vrain, Charles Baudelaire, no. 12 et seq.