G. AUGUSTIN-THIERRY - Le stigmate - 1898 Lot n° 1004

Complete, psychological, at the crossroads of the novel and the "imagination mistress of falsity", Stigma is an essential stone in the construction of the "modern psyche". "Meticulous and romantic, Gilbert Augustin-Thierry was gifted with the qualities that are the most rarely found and the most difficult to bring together: some would have made him the most patient of scholars and, others, the most adventurous of storytellers. He could, to content himself twice, write both history books and books of imagination. But, being of an ardent soul, he would not have tolerated to leave inactive either his scholarly curiosity or his inventive power. He worked only with all his soul; and his art is the highly original synthesis of several contrarieties, the solution of which was to lead to a philosophy . ...If one says that this kind of rather light literature is burdened with a serious mission, Gilbert Augustin-Thierry does not agree that the novel is a banter. He bases magnificent hopes on it. In the preface to his most beautiful book, The Stigma, he rejects the "timid" who chastised him for having written, on metaphysics and on the mysteries of belief, this little thing: a novel; wasn't it better to leave the analysis of faith to the philosopher and the priest? But for the novel, he demands the right, and he imposes on it the duty to understand and reveal everything, for the novel, he says, "is now a science. "He even claims that the novel is now a morality; and he adds: "the time, moreover, is near when morality itself will be formulated by science. "Such illusions were common in the days when Gilbert Augustin-Thierry was the system of his ideas. The marvellous progress of all science, due in large part to good methods, was the envy of anyone who was busy thinking. It was believed, with great enthusiasm, that the various objects of thought would become objects of science. Would not literature be scientific? The novel, frivolous yesterday, was co