Mallarmé, Stéphane

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

Scribal manuscript of 34 poems in a single neat calligraphic hand, with portrait of Mallarmé in ink and pencil as frontispiece, 2 poems ('Les Fleurs' and 'Apparition') with watercolour and gouache illustrations, these 3 illustrations attributed to Fernand Khnopff in a pencil note on the front free endpaper, the manuscript including some of his most celebrated pieces such as 'Herodiade', 'L'Apres-midi d'un faune', 'Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe', 'Prose pour des Esseintes' and 'Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui', each with separate title-page, the poems copied from various published sources, as noted beneath most titles (Parnasse de 1866, Poetes maudits, Parnasse de 1869-71 and so on), folio, 320 x 195 mm., c.80 pages, [c.1887], contemporary cream silk boards with floral motif, silk endpapers, 2 embroidered green silk markers, spine detached, joints weak

Mallarmé's poetry, which became known to a wider public after the publication of Verlaine's Poetes maudits, was not readily accessible to his readers, being for the most part published in journals rather than in book form. The poems in the present volume were published in journals between 1862 and 1887, shortly before the first collected edition of Mallarmé's poetry. Both Verlaine and Pierre Louys copied out poems for their own use, and the present manuscript was doubtless made for the same reason. A pencil note on one of the flyleaves records a tantalising connection to J. K. Huysmans: 'Aux dires de M. Simonson, ce manuscrit aurait ete envoye par J.K. Huysmans a Jos. Destre qui voulait connaitre les poemes de Mallarme, inedits alors. (verifie au moyen de la correspondance de Huysmans vendu le meme jour que ce ms).' The scribal circulation of poetry was widespread in earlier centuries, even after the invention of printing, but had become much less common by the nineteenth century. Julien Gracq in his Litterature a l'estomac refers to this method of dissemination, comparing it (though not disparagingly) to the spread of a virus which 'contaminates' a much wider public, and citing specifically the case of Mallarmé.