The Revenant Archive has added the following . . .
Antoine Jay, La Conversion d'un romantique, manuscrit de Jacques Delorme [The Conversion of a Romanticist, manuscript of Jacques Delorme]. 1830. First Edition. Moutardier, Librairie-Éditeur: Paris. Hardbound Octavo, 431 pp. Inscribed in Red Pen: [cf]. So. / Paris 8[?] 16 1848" & "A. [O?eg?es?]".
From the early 1820s until the "Battle of Hernani" in February of
1830, French Romanticist subculture became increasingly eccentric,
militant, and visible to the public eye, at least in Paris. The
resistance of the Classicist mainstream was ramped-up apace, and found
its most forceful expression in this harsh anti-Romanticist satire by
Antoine Jay, which rallied and catalyzed the Classicist opposition.
Like many on the left in the 1820s and early '30s, Jay was progressive
in political matters but deeply reactionary in linguistic and cultural
matters. This book made him one of the most prominent critics of "The
New Literature" as Romanticism was often called. Two years after its
publication, Jay was elected to the Académie Française, where he
militated against the admission of Victor Hugo in 1841; though Hugo was
admitted, Jay saw his revenge the following year when Classicist
audiences organised riots at the first performances of Hugo's play The Burgaves, spelling the end of the Romanticists' dominance of the popular stage since Hernani premiered within months of this novel.
The satire claims to have been written by Jacques Delorme, parodic
brother of Saint-Beuve's arch-romanticist nom-de-plume Joseph Delorme.
Jay parodies the "excesses" of the emerging avant-garde's lifestyle
(attacking the Jeunes-France group by name), skewers Romanticist
poetics, insults the movement's leaders and canon, and argues its
literary principles. He spreads rumours about the subculture,
exaggerates them, and invents others. He criticizes their experimental
language, the distortion of grammar in their work, their use of
neologisms, their employment of bizarre and inscrutable figurative
language, even reprinting large passages of Romanticist verse and drama
in order to ridicule it.
The book thus swiftly entered the Romanticist canon as a favoured target
of invective and ridicule, and probably exercised some reciprocal
influence on the radicalization of the movement's extreme fringes into
the avant-garde, which was accelerating just as the book was published.
It certainly affected the movement's representation of itself to the
public, for the avant-garde Romanticists typically portrayed themselves
in satirical form, as a function of their generally destabalising
project. Gautier's roman-à-clef The Jeunes-France is, in one
dimension, a parody of Jay's satire, as explicitly signaled in the tale,
"Daniel Jovard; or, the Conversion of a Classicist".
This first-edition copy has been well-read but also well cared-for by at
least one generation already, and probably at least two; the binding is
tight and the pages clean, but the spine and edges are worn from use.
The book's first owner has left no discernible trace, but an inscription
in red ink, which I can only read in part, records its purchase in
Paris during the 1848 revolution. A descriptive note in pencil, written
on the back of a scrap of paper
torn from an advert for fountain pens, has been tipped in as a bookmark
by a subsequent owner, probably in the 1920s.
