Le Jour de l’an d’un vagabond

On 1 January 1869, after various misadventures that had taken him as far as Corsica, Albert Glatigny was arrested by a drunken Maréchal des logis and thrown into a cell, where he remained locked up for four days on the fanciful charge of having murdered a magistrate: “We noticed this individual, whose appearance struck us as suspicious,” the gendarmes had declared. It was in this cell that Cosette, his dog, bravely defended her master against rats seeking to devour him. Glatigny was already suffering from the consumption that would eventually kill him, and his condition worsened in the unhealthy prison at Bocognano.

He recounted the episode as early as 17 January to François Polo, editor of the newspaper l’Éclipse, who decided to publish a confidential edition and to run advance extracts in his paper. The Lemerre edition, published the following year, is illustrated with a frontispiece by Gill depicting Glatigny in his cell, a ball chained to his ankle, with Cosette beside him, “a little griffon as thin as his master.”

Copy from the library of Prince Roland Bonaparte (bookplate on the pastedown and label on the front cover) of this rare edition (the 1870 Lemerre edition is often mistakenly given as the first).

Spine skillfully restored.

Clouzot, 132.