Lettre autographe signée adressée à l’éditeur Michel Lévy

“Monsieur,
Je viens de m’apercevoir que malgré mes supplications ardentes, réitérées, malgré mes lettres, mes corrections et recommandations, votre correcteur a écrit Edgar Poë au lieu de Edgar Poe. Il a probablement supposé que c’était moi qui me trompais. Quel anglais a jamais prononcé Poé ? Ce n’est pas ma faute si les français s’obstinent à écrire De Foë au lieu de Defoe (Difô).
Je ne ferais pas ……… mes exemplaires, et je les ferai brocher par quelqu’un de soigneux que j’ai trouvé ! Ayez donc la bonté de les faire remettre pour moi 22. rue d’Amsterdam. – Il me reste, Monsieur, à vous remercier de la charmante bonne grâce avec laquelle vous m’avez offert ces cinq exemplaires. Il serait à désirer que tous les éditeurs imitassent votre générosité !
Ch. Baudelaire
22. rue d’Amsterdam”.

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Baudelaire had just sold the rights to his translation of Edgar Poe’s Œuvres to Michel Lévy. The contract was signed on 1 November 1863, transferring “the full and entire ownership of the translation of the works of Edgard Poe, several editions of which have already appeared with MM. Michel Lévy frères.”

Baudelaire was not the first to take an interest in Poe — several adapted or translated texts already existed when he discovered him in 1847 — but he was the one who gave Poe international renown through his French translations, which met with great success. “Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe?” he wrote to the journalist Théophile Thoré in 1864. “Because he resembled me. The first time I opened a book of his, I saw, with terror and delight, not only subjects I had dreamed of, but sentences I had thought of, written by him twenty years before.”

After several failed attempts with prospective publishers, Baudelaire finally signed a contract with Michel Lévy on 3 August 1855 for two volumes: Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires. The first appeared in 1856; the second, along with La Relation d’Arthur Gordon Pym de Nantucket, the following year. The prose poem Eureka completed the set, also published by Michel Lévy, in 1864 — a decision he would later bitterly regret.

Here Baudelaire complains of the publishing house’s careless proofreader, particularly regarding the spelling of Poe’s name and his own: “I have just noticed that, despite my ardent and repeated entreaties, despite my letters, corrections and instructions, your proofreader has written Edgar Poë instead of Edgar Poe.” He nonetheless thanks his correspondent for the five copies granted to him, which he will have bound himself “by someone careful whom I have found.”