autograph MANUSCRIT, Une Vie "old manuscript"; title and 114 leaves in-fol. (ca. 32 x 22 cm, then 36 x 22,5 cm), mounted on tabs, and bound in a folio volume in dark jansenist morocco, inner border in the same morocco decorated with a gilt vegetal frieze edged with fillets, double fillet on the edges, spine titled in gilt, combed paper endpapers (Champs-Stroobants).
Precious working manuscript of the beginning of the novel Une Vie.
The earliest known manuscript of this masterpiece of Maupassant's novel, which is also his first novel published in 1883, as a serial in Gil Blas and then as a volume by Havard. This manuscript is essential to understand the genesis of the novel. It can be dated, according to Louis Forestier, between March and June 1878, and corresponds roughly to the first four chapters. It is written in black ink on the front of sheets of satin vellum paper. On the title page, Maupassant has indicated "Old manuscript".
A first part, on in-4 sheets, includes 87 leaves, paginated by Maupassant in pencil (sometimes ironed in ink) from 1 to 73 (including a f. "7.8.9", a 43 bis, and the forgotten p. 69), the ff. 74-87 not paginated. It is presented as a clean-up, with a wide margin reserved on the left, but has been extensively crossed out and corrected, with many passages crossed out or marked in the margin "delete". Folio 35, smaller than the others, is an addition. The first page is headed by chapter number I; a chapter number II has been added in the margin on p. 12, without correcting the number II on p. 51. The manuscript begins at the time of Jeanne's departure from the convent, whereas the beginning of the book intervenes the following day, when Jeanne returned to her parents. Let us quote this beginning: "She kissed the good sister who was crying one last time, put a gold coin in the poor box hanging near the entrance to the parlor, cast a farewell glance at the courtyard, at the walls, at the whole physiognomy of the house so well known where she had spent five years of her youth ; Then she took the arm of her little mother, whose hypertrophy, combined with an immoderate fatness, almost prevented her from walking, and, with a dry eye and a light heart, she passed, never to return, the hated threshold of the convent, whose high door closed behind her, heavy, resounding, impassable for the others. This first part ends on the evening of the promise of marriage (in which a young blind man intervenes who will disappear from the novel): "Roger stammered, indecisive. Jeanne understood that he was looking up at her; then she also turned around and her beautiful earthenware eyes, which seemed thickened, hardened by passion, fell on him. He received a shock in his large eyes drowned in love; and, in a weak voice: - "I thank you, Madam, I will stay as long as you want". A cloud had probably obscured the sun for a few moments, unless the radiance of the star had suddenly increased, for it seemed to Jeanne that a sudden brightness invaded the horizon as for apotheoses; and the garden, the wood further on, the men who were bawling at the top of their lungs and were now bursting into her ears, the room where their four guests were filling up with meat and wine, appeared to her under a stream of daylight, in a flood of light. She found it hard not to sing too, so joyful had she become; and an urge to walk, to dance, to run stirred her legs; she felt light enough to touch the ceiling with a leap, to .../...
pass like a ball through the window, to go up the big hill in front of her with a burst of speed, and to come down again with a few jumps. And suddenly she said to herself: "I love him, I love him, it is sure that I love him". And she kissed the blind man so passionately that everyone looked at her. Then she blushed and became calm again".
The second part (ff. 88-114), on large sheets, with a smaller margin, is overloaded with erasures and corrections, with marginal additions, and can be assimilated to a draft, presenting in the margins pen drawings: caricatures and heads of men in profile (f. 94-95), naked woman (f. 103), attempts at monograms (f. 111). It begins thus: "Married! So she was married! The succession of things, of movements, of events accomplished since dawn seemed to her a dream, a real dream! There are those troubled moments when everything seems to change around us. The very gestures do not have the same meaning as on other days; even the hours no longer seem to be in their ordinary place. Yes, everything in her eyes became different, took on an unusual aspect, appeared to her as if through a veil, her bridal veil"... The manuscript ends during a family dinner, where we come to speak about Henry, Jeanne's brother (this character, who introduced Jeanne to her husband, will disappear from the novel): "The Baron
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