SAINTE-BEUVE (Charles-Augustin).

Autograph manuscripts of two short stories: Le Clou d'or and La Pendule, published after his death in 1881, as well as other unpublished pages. In-4, garnet morocco, jansenist, spine with gilt title, inner lace (Marius Michel). - Le Clou d'or : one autograph page titled Petit roman, one oblong in-8 page bearing Petit roman du Clou d'or with two quotations from Sénac de Meillan, and 61 handwritten pages in black ink on 35 leaves (32 of which are in-8 format and 3 in-16 format), including two prologues, the first one bearing Le Clou d'or / Petit roman, pendant d'Adolphe, a one-page note and 14 letters accompanied by 8 envelopes (one with the name and complete address of the addressee) in 60 x 95 mm format, with about 50 autograph corrections. They are followed by an autograph letter of the addressee, Madame d'Arbouville, of 3 pages in-8 on 2 sheets. The manuscript of the Clou d'or contains 2 unpublished letters of Sainte-Beuve (the first and the fourth). The letter IX of the published collection is placed here in fourteenth position. - La Pendule: 7 handwritten pages small in-4, 6 of them of a first draft (one page with a single line at the top, the others full) and one page with the 8 lines of the poem L'Horloge arrêtée by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (in Sainte-Beuve's hand), in black ink, with more than 120 autograph corrections and 2 checkmarks. Bound afterwards are 7 other autograph letters or diary pages by Sainte-Beuve, apparently unpublished, forming a total of 24 and a half pages in-8 in black ink, with about ten light corrections. All the handwritten pages are mounted on tabs on a sheet of white vellum. Some minor soiling, small angular loss to the second manuscript leaf. Precious manuscript of this epistolary novel by Sainte-Beuve, published after his death, tracing his passionate love for Madame d'Arbouville through her original correspondence, and which was to be a counterpart, according to its author, to Benjamin Constant's Adolphe. It is followed by the manuscript of a short story in which the same disappointed and transformed love is taken up again in a different mode, La Pendule, to which many unpublished autograph pages concerning another epistolary relationship follow. Le Clou d'or, a small novel by letter, is in fact the publication of twelve letters from Sainte-Beuve to Madame d'Arbouville, written between 1840 and 1850, of which the writer had "traced the plan and the outline" and added a small prologue before abandoning it in a drawer. It was his faithful secretary, Jules Troubat, who came into possession of the manuscript among the papers that had been bequeathed to him, and published it in 1881 with the unpublished fragments of another short story, La Pendule, accompanied by a preface in which Troubat evoked, without naming her, the addressee of these letters, Madame d'Arbouville, née Sophie de Bazancourt (1810-1850), niece of Count Molé. Madame d'Arbouville had a very popular literary salon around 1835, and her influence was such that she was said to have the power to "make academics". For ten years, she was Sainte-Beuve's best friend, a friend that the writer seems to have loved passionately, as shown by this correspondence transformed into an epistolary novel. The influence of Madame d'Arbouville on Sainte-Beuve was very great, although she died very young, at the age of 40. It can be said that after the heroine of the Livre d'amour (Adèle Hugo), Madame d'Arbouville was the woman who held the greatest place in Sainte-Beuve's mind and heart. He wrote many verses for her, and, above all, this Clou d'or, gathering some of the letters he wrote under the blow of passion, which changed into a very great friendship. Léon Séché published in 1906 the letters of Madame d'Arbouville to Sainte-Beuve under the title Muses romantiques. Madame d'Arbouville according to her letters to Sainte-Beuve. The second short story, entitled La Pendule, dates from 1844-1845. Dedicated to Rodolphe Töpffer, the famous writer from Geneva, it tells from another angle, through the fictional life of a watchmaker, the same relationship with Madame d'Arbouville. The novella contains two poems, one by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (whom Sainte-Beuve helped to make known), copied in full by him, and the other by Joseph Delorme, the poetic pseudonym by which Sainte-Beuve started in literature (in the manuscript Sainte-Beuve wrote only the first line). At the beginning of his relationship with Madame d'Arbouville, Sainte-Beuve had made her read his first collection of verses, without revealing the mystery of his pseudonym, and Madame d'Arbouville had then felt sorry for the premature death of this young poet. Following these two manuscripts, the 7 long autograph letters addressed by Sainte-Beuve to an unknown woman do not seem to have been published. They do not seem