Une saison en enfer
The only edition and the only volume of poetry published during Rimbaud's lifetime.
We will not dwell (too) long on this well-known story: Léon Losseau visiting the printer Poot in Brussels, going down to the cellar, the dusty bundle, the stove: “It was in 1901 [December 1902, in fact]. I was looking for an offprint of La Belgique judiciaire, a periodical that had been printed in Brussels for sixty years […]. You will understand the emotion felt by the bibliophile when he saw what a dirty, stained, dust-covered bundle — one of several he had just lifted — contained: hundreds of copies of Rimbaud’s La Saison en enfer!” Rimbaud had never paid his bill; the printer had kept the books, and his clerk, Adrien-Roméo de Ghilage, a workman at the time of typesetting in 1873, had by then become Poot’s successor at 49 rue aux Choux.
Losseau then numbered, in ink, in the upper right corner, the first copies he distributed to friends, to a few writers (Zweig, Rolland, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren) and to several libraries. The original printing was a little over 500 copies; Rimbaud distributed a few of them, generously given to him by the printer (fewer than ten, given to Paul Verlaine, then in prison, to Ernest Delahaye, Ernest Millot, Jean-Louis Forain and Jean Richepin — the “others” are unknown). These extremely rare copies were long a source of pride among bibliophiles, and Losseau’s 1914 announcement caused a sensation in France: “the press mocked collectors dismayed to see their supposedly extremely rare copy of the Saison lose much of its market value” (J.-J. Lefèvre, in Sur Arthur Rimbaud, vol. 3, 1914).
Losseau said he left with 425 copies (the receipt, dated 1 January 1903, records 400 copies). Paterne Berrichon, quickly informed of the “discovery,” wanted Losseau simply to burn the books he had found. He refused; what he did destroy was the fable, the lie of the book-burning that Isabelle and Paterne Berrichon had been spreading for years and wished to see perpetuated.
Losseau died in August 1949 and, in 1938, claimed to have never sold any copies commercially, apart from a few given away in 1914 at the time of the lecture that revealed the affair. It was not until 1943 that part of this stock of wrappered copies of Une saison en enfer was sold to a Brussels bookseller, who piously and slowly placed them on the market — but only part of them. Of the “Losseau stock,” the safe in the fine mansion on rue de Nimy still holds the remaining copies of these famous discoveries of 1901. They remain carefully protected, inaccessible and inalienable.
A philanthropist, patron, bibliophile and medal collector, Losseau bequeathed to the city of Mons and the Province of Hainaut, upon his death, his house on rue de Nimy, containing his remarkable library of nearly 100,000 books and periodicals. A Doctor of Law from the University of Liège, a doctor of political and administrative sciences, and a member of the Mons bar, Léon Losseau pleaded only in defense of the humble and the disadvantaged. A lawyer, bar president and company director, this scholar enjoyed sufficient means to avoid spending his days in court, preferring instead the gatherings of the many learned societies to which he belonged. His name remains forever linked to the discovery of the legendary copies of Une Saison en enfer.
A good copy; chemise and slipcase worn.