Lot n° 210
Estimation :
10000 - 15000
EUR
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, countess... - Lot 210 - Ader
Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, countess of LAFAYETTE (1634-1693). Manuscript, Caraccio. History. By Madame de La Fayette; one volume in-8 (17,5 x 12 cm) of 87 unnumbered ff. (including 1 f. of title), bound in brown calf from the end of the XVIIth c., red edges, spine decorated and titled Caraccio.
An unpublished novel by Mme de La Fayette ?
This manuscript was for a long time known only by the mention of it in the Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu M. le Duc de La Vallière, première partie (Paris, 1783), written by the bookseller De Bure for the auction of this library (volume II, p. 647), under the n° 4142 : " Caraccio, histoire, par Mme de La Fayette. In-8. v.b. Manuscript on paper of the XVII century, containing 87 leaves. We do not know it printed ".
It is from this single catalog entry that Quérard, Hoefer, Ashton (Madame de La Fayette, 1922) and others knew of the existence of the manuscript, and of a possible unpublished novel by Mme de La Fayette.
In the 19th c., a Provençal bibliophile, Antoine de Saint-Ferriol, had possession of it, as the ink stamp with his arms on the title testifies.
Finally, around 1950, another bibliophile found this volume on the shelves of a bookstore, and communicated it to Bernard Pingaud, who judged the work "alas! to be of an insignificant mediocrity. As far as one can judge, it is a hasty and clumsy copy made at the end of the 17th century of a draft of a novel which, like the Spanish History, but with much less elegance, is similar to Zaïde. It is probable that we are in the presence of one of the very first attempts of Mme de La Fayette; it adds nothing to her glory." (Mme de La Fayette par elle-même, ed. du Seuil, 1959, p. 2; see also her edition of Mme de La Fayette's novels at Gallimard, Folio no. 778, pp. 375-376).
It is indeed a copy, in cursive but legible handwriting, in brown ink. Apart from a rather large number of letters, there are no autograph manuscripts of Mme de La Fayette; they would have made it possible to definitively settle the controversies concerning the attribution of the works published under her name after her death. It is known that Mme de La Fayette always refused to recognize the works that came out of her pen (except for a Portrait of Mme la marquise de Sévigné printed in 1659 in a collection of portraits with a limited edition not intended for the trade), her social position making her consider it unseemly to make books. From there problems of attribution which, with various phases, have not ceased to be raised from the XVIIth century to our days. Concerning the three novels (or short stories) published during her lifetime (the Princesse de Montpensier, Zaïde and the Princesse de Clèves), these problems only concern the degree of collaboration of her friends: Ménage, Segrais, Huet, La Rochefoucauld. For letters from Mme de La Fayette and testimonies from contemporaries (notably Segrais and Huet themselves) leave no reasonable doubt about the part she took in the elaboration of these works. But the same cannot be said of the posthumous publications. For these (besides the internal criticism of the texts, always uncertain) the attribution rests on the assertion of the editor, who may have had information that escapes us today: thus for the Comtesse de Tende (published in 1718 and 1724), the Histoire d'Henriette d'Angleterre (1720) and the Mémoires de la cour de France (1731). But the attribution is also based (and perhaps more surely) on old manuscript copies, from the end of the 17th century or the beginning of the 18th century (thus prior to the publications) which explicitly give the first two works mentioned above to Mme de La Fayette. One of these manuscripts (preserved in Munich) contains, after these two texts, the only copy of the Spanish History (published only in 1909). The title page gives Mme de La Fayette as the author of this account, and this fact constitutes the basis (admittedly fragile) of the attribution; it is on a similar basis that the attribution of Caraccio to the same author rests.
The negligence of the Caraccio manuscript (numerous repeated words, some perhaps skipped) justifies the terms of "hasty and clumsy copy" used by B. Pingaud. The punctuation is almost entirely absent, and the spelling of the most fanciful; but the autograph letters of Mrs de La Fayette present the same defects. As for the numerous wobbly sentences, they undoubtedly testify, more than to the carelessness of the copyist, that it would be the copy of a draft, the first draft of a novel that the author would not have judged worthy of being reworked and polished as were Zaïde or the Princesse de Clèves, which is however not exempt from syntactic clumsinesses, as one has noticed since Valincour. To return to the spelling, let us note this detail: at the end of the novel appear these two lines: "Ainsy se vit enfin, par le
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