The Devil in Love revisited

In the first of three updates to my Halloween 2011 post on Cazotte’s The Devil in Love (here), I mentioned that I had discovered there were a number of American editions of this novel. In that post, I provided details of four original editions (representing four different translations: 1791, 1793, 1798, 1810), and three modern editions (1925, 1991 and 1993).

The three American editions I discovered in 2012 were those of 1810 (New York), 1828 and 1830 (Boston). Not having access to any of these online, I suggested at that time, that “it seems most likely that they are all reprints of no.2—the 1793 edition.”



Since writing the above, I have acquired a copy of The Devil in Love that was printed in Boston in 1828.



As you can see above, this edition has a charming frontispiece of “Biondetta Playing On The Harp”; and as you can see below, the Boston text matches—as I suspected it would—no.2 in my previous post, the 1793 edition. This edition starts “At five and twenty I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples, and lived in gay society …”



The two Boston editions are somewhat similar in size and length, suggesting one may be a reprint of the other. It is likely that Peaslee's the Boston edition is itself a reprint of Van Winkle's New York edition, but this is something I will only be able to establish in the unlikely event that I end up with a copy to compare my Boston edition to.



Below is my updated list of editions of The Devil in Love. Since 2011, three of the early editions have been added to Google Books, so I have added links to these. I have also passed on my copy of Biondetta, or the Enamoured Spirit, which illustrates my previous post, to Monash University, and have updated the holdings accordingly.

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[1] Alvarez, Or, Irresistible Seduction; A Spanish Tale (London: W. Richardson, 1791). ¶ On Google Books (here). ESTC: t226198 (recording 2 copies); “When I was five-and-twenty years old, I was a captain in the the King of Naples’ guards: we lived very sociably among ourselves …”

[2] The Devil in Love, Translated from the French (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793). ¶ ESTC: t71529 (4 copies); on ECCO; “At five and twenty I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples, and lived in gay society …”

[3] The Enamoured Spirit (London: Lee and Hurst, Bell, Millar and J. Wright, 1798). ¶ On Google Books (here). ESTC: t210676 (2 copies); “At the age of five-and-twenty I was Captain in the Guards of His Majesty the King of Naples, and kept constant company with my brother officers”

[4] Biondetta, or the Enamoured Spirit (London: J. Miller, 1810). ¶ On Google Books (here). I have located nine copies: L [1458.d.16] and O [Fic. 27524 e.164]; CaSRU [PQ 1961 C5 A6413 1810]; CtY [Hfd29 151N], DLC [PZ3.C3197 B FT MEADE], MH-H [*EC8 L5875 Y810c], PSt [PQ1961.C5A65 1810], ViU [PZ2.C39 B 1810]; VMoU [840.5 C386 A6/B]; “At the age of five and twenty I was a captain in the guards of the King of Naples.”

[4A] The Devil in Love (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1810). pp: 178: i–viii 9-178; 17cm ¶ One copy: NNYSL [Ham C3865 D3].

[4B] The Devil in Love (Boston: J. P. Peaslee, 1828). ¶ pp. 102: i–vi 7–102; illus.; 12cm. ¶ One copy: AuPC-PS [lacking i–ii?]; also recorded here as having being in the “Library of the Hasty-Pudding Club in Harvard” in 1841. “At the age of five and twenty I was a captain in the guards of the King of Naples.”

[4C] The Devil in Love (Boston: N. H. Whitaker, 1830). pp. 110; illus.; 12cm ¶ Three copies: DeU [PQ1961 .C5 A6413 1830], MH-H [GEN 40516.6.2*], InU-Li [PQ1961.C5 D513 1830].

[5] The Devil in Love (London: Heinemann; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925). Limited edition (UK: 75 copies; US: 365 copies) ¶ Reprints translation no. 2; available online on Europeana, courtesy of the Bodleian Library (direct link to PDF here)

[6] The Devil in Love, translated by Judith Landry (Dedalus, 1991; 2nd ed. 2011). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a captain of the king's Guards at Naples; we kept our own company much of the time …”

[7] The Devil in Love. Followed by Jacques Cazotte: His Life, Trial, Prophecies, and Revelations by Gerard de Nerval, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Marsilio, 1993). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples. We lived much of our time …”

A Typical Research Day

Although, for me, only one day each week is flagged as a research day—a day on which I am not expected to either teach or attend meetings—I do research at all times of the day and all days of the week. I expect my colleagues do the same. The advantage of a research day is that it does give me the opportunity to do things that require extended focus, or extended meandering. If I were a very disciplined and well-organised person, I would make use of this time to write article after article. And sometime I do get to do this, but more often than not I use my time to follow up on the interesting leads captured in files and folders that litter my computer desktop.

Thursday was typical of that second kind of day. Last week I happened upon a blog post (here) that alerted me to the fact that the University of Virginia Library has acquired a copy of the French translation of Ab.9.2 The Rash Resolve; Or, or the Untimely Discovery (1724): Emanuella, ou la découverte premature. Par Madame Élise Haywood (Paris, an IX [1800/1801]). I located only two copies of this book in 2004 (both in Europe), so it was a pleasure to add a third.

While updating the holdings listed in my Bibliography, I took the opportunity to look for more copies, which led me to a series of discoveries: the Bavarian State Library have scanned their copy of Emanuella and it is now on Google Books (here), so I added it to my list of Haywood texts online here and revised my entry in my Bibliography; I found two new listings for the translation in French literary journals, and was able to correct the date on the one I listed in 2004 (adding this and this, and correcting the details of this); and—via the latter—I found a (very short) review of the translation here), so I have posted the review and translation here and added it to my list of Haywood reviews here and in my revised Bibliography.

After all this updating I still haven't got around to mentioning what first struck me about the University of Virginia copy of Emanuella: it contains the bookplates of Paul Lacroix (1806–84) the French author and journalist (famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page here) and André Breton (1896-1966), the founder of Surrealism (also on Wikipedia here). As David Whitesell points out in his blog entry, it is fitting that Salvador Dalí designed Breton’s "arresting" bookplate.

The University of Virginia copy was (owned and) donated by the renowned "angliciste," Professor Maurice Lévy (1929-2012; also on Wikipedia here), author of, among other things, Le Roman “Gothique” Anglais, 1764–1824 (PhD. thesis, 1968), Roman et société en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle (1978) and some important articles on Mathhew Lewis. A pencil notation is visible on the photo of the endpaper posted by Whitesell, which suggests Levy paid one thousand francs (ca. A$220) for it—though when he did so is not clear.

The Levy collection is relatively small, but choice. As the collector himself explains (here), a "distinctive feature" of the French editions of (British) gothic novels—a feature "not shared by corresponding English volumes"—is that they are "individually illustrated with frontispieces by (most of them) reputed engravers." Nicole Bouché explains that "almost all" of Levy's late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century volumes are "in their original, often quite striking French bindings." That is, these French gothic novels are gorgeous: beautifully illustrated, printed and bound.

Anyone, like me, who has gone looking for a fetching illustration to use in a lecture on a gothic novel—such as Vathek, The Castle of Otranto, The Monk or Zofloya—will recognise the truth of Levy's observation: if you can't find a French edition, you may as well give up! My lectures on the gothic novel in my units "The Dark Hero" and "The Shadow of Reason" and "Reading the Past" are a hymn in praise of French engravers.

Until I read the posts by Whitesell and Bouché about the Levy collection, I had never heard of Levy's Images du roman noir (Paris: Éric Losfeld, 1973)—but as soon as I did, I knew I needed a copy, so I ordered one. (There appears to be only one copy in any library in Australia!) Nor was I aware of CERLI (the "Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur les Littératures de l'Imaginaire" [Centre for Studies and Research on the Literature of the Imagination (here)] until I read the Wikipedia entry (it is not mentioned in the Whitesell and Bouché posts), but I quickly found CERLI online, went straight to the bibliography page and was greeted by some very welcome headings: Fantastique; Littérature gothique; Vampires; Merveilleux; Fantasy; Science-fiction …

This site will going straight into my reader for the Dark Hero. Actually, I will have to do it next week now. Until then, I will just leave a screen-cap of the site on my desktop to remind me ...

Cazotte's The Devil in Love

Halloween seems like a good time to do a post on Jacques Cazotte's Le diable amoureux, Nouvelle Espagnole (Naples, 1772), which I am considering including in my Dark Hero unit next time it runs. There have been a few recent editions, one of which has just been reissued, so there should be no difficulty getting the text.

There were four separate translations of this work into English during the high Romantic period. These are:

[1] Alvarez, Or, Irresistible Seduction; A Spanish Tale (London: W. Richardson, 1791). ¶ ESTC: t226198 (recording 2 copies); on ECCO; “When I was five-and-twenty years old, I was a captain in the the King of Naples’ guards: we lived very sociably among ourselves …”

[2] The Devil in Love, Translated from the French (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1793). ¶ ESTC: t71529 (4 copies); on ECCO; “At five and twenty I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples, and lived in gay society …”

[3] The Enamoured Spirit (London: Lee and Hurst, Bell, Millar and J. Wright, 1798). ¶ ESTC: t210676 (2 copies); not on ECCO; “At the age of five-and-twenty I was Captain in the Guards of His Majesty the King of Naples, and kept constant company with my brother officers”

[4] Biondetta, or the Enamoured Spirit (London: J. Miller, 1810). ¶ COPAC and WorldCat record 8 copies: L [1458.d.16] and O [Fic. 27524 e.164]; CaSRU [PQ 1961 C5 A6413 1810]; CtY [Hfd29 151N], DLC [PZ3.C3197 B FT MEADE], MH-H [*EC8 L5875 Y810c], PSt [PQ1961.C5A65 1810], ViU [PZ2.C39 B 1810]; “At the age of five and twenty I was a captain in the guards of the King of Naples.”

As you can see, most of these editions are quite rare.

In addition to these four translations between 1791 and 1810, there have been three modern editions, two of which are new translations:

[5] The Devil in Love (London: Heinemann; Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925). Limited edition (UK: 75 copies; US: 365 copies) ¶ Reprints translation no. 2; available online on Europeana, courtesy of the Bodleian Library (direct link to PDF here)

[6] The Devil in Love, translated by Judith Landry (Dedalus, 1991; 2nd ed. 2011). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a captain of the king's Guards at Naples; we kept our own company much of the time …”

[7] The Devil in Love. Followed by Jacques Cazotte: His Life, Trial, Prophecies, and Revelations by Gerard de Nerval, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Marsilio, 1993). ¶ “At the age of twenty-five I was a Captain of the Guards in the service of the King of Naples. We lived much of our time …”

Unlike the English, the French have been producing beautifully-illustrated editions of Le diable amoureux since the start (the first edition is illustrated). I will have to get myself a copy of the poetic adaptation by "Gerard de Nerval" [Gérard Labrunie]:

Le diable amoureux, roman fantastique par J. Cazotte, Précédé de sa vie, de son procès, et de ses prophéties et révélations par Gerard de Nerval. Illustré de 200 dessins par Edouard de Beaumont (Paris, Léon Canivet, 1845).

The Beaumont illustrations were reprinted in 1871 by H. Plon and copies of that reprint are fairly common. But there are some stunning private-press editions from the twentieth century that I would like to get too, with illustrations by Paul-Émile Bécat (1936), Maurice Leroy (1946), André Michel (1950), Michel Jamar (1960), Jean Traynier (1966) and—undoubtedly—others.

According to Joseph Andriano, the most reliable edition of the French text is in Romanciers du XVIIIe siecle, edited by Etiemble et Marguerite du Cheyron, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade, 1965), 303–78. However, there are two other modern editions of the French text: those edited by Max Milner (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1979) and Georges Décote (Paris: Gallimard, 1981).

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As for why I would consider this novel for the Dark Hero unit … well, I was persuaded to do so by the chapter in Andriano's Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic Fiction (1993), 10, which mounts a strong argument for The Devil in Love as the first conte fantastique: the first fantasy.

Nothing quite like Cazotte's work had appeared before, even though its temptation plot, with its prototype in the life of St. Anthony, was familiar to all Catholics. The text seems a curious hybrid of several popular genres of the time—contes licencieux, contes morales, contes defees—but it has long had the reputation of being the first of a new genre—le conte fantastique, not only in Todorov's narrow sense of reader hesitation but in a broader one: Cazotte simply added the mimetic techniques of realism, already apparent in some fabliaux and contes, to the marvelous. The result was an exquisitely ambiguous work in which a fairly ordinary young man is confronted with both the supernatural and the perfectly natural "realistic" problem of choosing a mate. Le Diable amoureux may also be considered Gothic in that term's broadest sense. It has the trappings—ruins, diabolism, sexual pursuit—and it gives a little frisson.
  With elements of all these genres Le Diable amoureux had something to please almost everyone: humor, light titillation, periodic chills, and moral messages. Only a thoroughly ambiguous work could provide such conflicting needs.

 UPDATE 13 December 2012: while searching through the New York Society Library's Hammond Collection I stumbled upon a New York edition of The Devil in Love from 1810. A search on WorldCat shows that I also missed Boston editions of 1828 and 1830. These three editions should have appeared above as nos.5–7, pushing the total number of editions to nine.

Although some of these American editions are available in microformat—the 1810 edition is on microopaque—I have not been able to look at any of them yet. Once I have, I will update the above list identifying the translations used in America. (Given the choice of title for the 1810 edition, it seems most likely that they are all reprints of no.2—the 1793 edition.)

[UPDATE 10 December 2014: added ESTC numbers, availability on ECCO, etext of no. 5, and call numbers of no. 4.]

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]

The Dark Hero: Demonic, Deranged and Cursed

On Thursday I was told that my new unit, The Dark Hero: Demonic, Deranged and Cursed, has been approved to run next year at Monash. It has a new Arts-faculty-wide unit code: ATS2914/ATS3914.

I have wanted to run a course like this for a very long time. One of my favourite honours courses at the University of Tasmania was The Byronic Hero, but the particular type of Byronic-Hero stories that have always attracted my attention are the ones with a supernatural element: Marlow's Faustus, Milton's Satan, Beckford's Vathek, Byron's Cain.

When I was a teenager I lived on a constant diet of fantasy and horror stories, books on witchcraft and the occult, and Hammer Horror films, so I ended up reading Stoker's Dracula and Goethe's Faust as soon as I had enough of my own money to buy them.

From memory, both were second-hand copies from the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult series, which were pretty common, and cheap, in op-shops, garage sales and book exchanges at the time.

I had quite a few "Library of the Occult" volumes at one stage, before I went to university and decided I was far too mature for that sort of thing. And, since I always needed more book-money, I decided to sell the lot. I don't remember what I spent the money on, but it is a decision I soon, and have long, regretted!

I recently started buying replacement copies of some of the paperbacks that I sold then, but the books are a lot harder to find and a lot more expensive now. (Which reminds me of that saying "no man is rich enough to buy back his past.") The images below are taken from one such recent—nostalgic—purchase; appropriate, yes?

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The type of "Dark Hero" that my new course focusses on is everywhere in modern fiction, film and TV: David Boreanaz as Angel (Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and Angel (1999–2004), Johnny Depp as Dean Corso (The Ninth Gate (1999), the whole League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), Heath Ledger as The Dark Knight (2008) and Ian Somerhalder as Damon Salvatore (The Vampire Diaries (2010), but you could include almost every supernatural romance and romantic vampire hero in this list.

But the focus of my unit is on the ur-texts, the Dark Heroes of the Early Modern, Modern and Romantic periods. The synopsis runs as follows:

The unit is designed to introduce students to the development of the Dark or Satanic Hero in a range of major English texts selected to illustrate the tremendous impact and popularity of this powerful figure in the Romantic Period. Writers such as Marlow, Milton, Beckford, Lewis and Byron created defiant heroes who embody radical individualism, self-sufficiency and ambition, but who are isolated, gloomy and dissatisfied by their revolt against God, government and society. Special attention will be given to the relationship between the Dark and Byronic Heroes in the nineteenth century and the survival and transformation of this figure in the vampires and villains of contemporary culture.

I haven't decided on the final text list yet. There are a few I haven't read that I am considering, like Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: or The Moor (1806) and Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); there is also a lot of poetry to choose from, apart from Byron's “Manfred” (1816–17) and “Cain” (1822), like Bürger’s “Lenore” (1773); Goethe's “The Bride of Corinth” (1797); Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) and “Christabel” (1797–1800), and Keats' “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819). Narrowing down the list will be a real challenge. But fun. Lots of fun.

[UPDATE: 2 July 2016: After all my pictures disappeared again I decided to give up on external hosts for large versions (1000px) of my image files and, for now on, will stick with the smaller images (500px), which Blogger is prepared to host.]