CONSTANT, Benjamin Adolphe, anecdote trouvée dans les papiers d’un inconnu, et publiée par M. Benjamin de Constant.

First French edition, the first one of the two Parisian published. Carteret, I, p. 178-179; Clouzot, 70; En Français dans le texte, 225.

After the Hundred Days’ saga and the triumph of the ultras, Benjamin Constant is forced into exile. He goes to London and decides to publish at the same time in London and in Paris this work written in Geneva in 1806, amongst the storms of the author’s tumultuous passion for Germaine de Staël.

Three editions were published at the same date: one commonly called “London edition”, and two Parisian editions bearing two different addresses. “All three are rare and very sought-after” writes Clouzot.

In this partly autobiographical novel that remains one of the master-pieces of the analysis novel, Benjamin Constant, spectator of himself, portrays with talent this already romantic hero embodying the evil of the century: “this weariness, this uncertainty, this absence of strength, this perpetual analysis, which places an ulterior motive next to all feelings and which corrupts them since their birth”. This dense and short work will ensure the writer’s lasting fame.

“With ‘Adolphe’, he gave one of the most beautiful novels of French literature, one of the most mysterious ones, of the most provocative ever written; it always arouses passionate reactions and numerous and varied studies… The first edition is the one of Colburn, in association with Treuttel and Würtz in Paris, announced on June 6th in the ‘Morning Chronicle’. It is extremely rare (three copies known in the public libraries: the British Library, Harvard and the Taylorian Institution at Oxford). The B.n.F. doesn’t own it, but it possesses the first Parisian edition published almost at the same time, printed by Crapelet from the English edition’s proofs. The French editor is placed before his Londoner colleague at the address and the printer’s mark is, of course, different.” (En Français dans le texte, 225).

“It is considered as the typical psychological analysis novel. The author published this work as an ʽanecdote found in the papers of a stranger’, to show to which dark tragedies can lead heartlessness. Under this form, which allows him to seem detached from his own passions of a man of his time, this tenacious partisan of the constitutional liberties was able to confess a love disillusion and to defend his political ideas with an increased fervor”. (Dictionnaire des Œuvres, I, p. 33).

It is a “very rare work of a great literary value” writes Carteret.

A copy in its pure contemporary condition, preserved in its green quarter-morocco binding with a finely decorated flat spine, of a great novel, classical by its vigor, yet already of a romantic nature.