The Bibliographer's Last Resort: Reading the Text

The Bibliographer's Last Resort: Reading the TextVivienne G. Mylne Some three years ago, while looking through a catalogue from the Belgian bookseller Pierre Gasón, I came across the following entry: adepte MODERNE(L1), ou le vrai secret des francs-maçons.—Imprimé cette Année à Londres, aux dépens de l'Auteur (1747 ?), in-12, (2)-229 pages.1 In the subsequent comments by M. Gasón, who frequently goes into scholarly detail about his wares, the work is referred to as a roman; and since I am currently collaborating in bibliographical work on eighteenthcentury French fiction, this unfamiliar title naturally aroused my interest.2 The suggested date, 1747, puts L'Adepte moderne into the province of S. Paul Jones's List ofFrench Prose Fiction from 1700 to 1750 (1939), but Gason helpfully notes: "Inconnu à Jones, à Barbier, à Quérard et à Brunet." Such a comment is labour-saving, from the researcher's point of view, but the absence of this work from the standard literary bibliographies indicates, of course, that it is rare and little known (a fact to rejoice any bookseller's heart, as it justifies setting a fairly steep price). There was no previous reference to such a title in the lists compiled by our bibliographical team, and the British Library catalogue did not offer the work under "Adepte." I filed my notes as an unsolved puzzle. 1 The title page and the running titles actually have the form "franc-maçons," though the text gives "francs-maçons." 2 Angus Martin, Richard Frautschi, and I are preparing a bibliography of all eighteenth-century works of fiction in French; this will be a revised and conflated version of S.P. Jones's checklist and our own Bibliographie du genre romanesquefrançais 1751-1800 (London, 1977). EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 1, October 1992 2 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Eventually, when the title appeared in another catalogue, I ordered and obtained the novel for myself. It was now possible to draft a bibliographical entry on the work, and to prepare our standard brief description of the contents. One detail, however, remained uncertain: the date. And since our lists are arranged chronologically, presenting each work in the year of its first publication, it was imperative to try and fix the date of L'Adepte moderne. On this point Gason's further notes provide an embarras de richesses, listing Fesch and Caillet as reference works which do include this title, and continuing "Wolfsteig (41.487) donne la date (évidemment fausse) 1777, mentionne la date (tout aussi fantaisiste) 1780 donnée par Taute et pense qu'il s'agit d'une traduction de Der neue Goldmacher (Berlin, 1770) attribué à 'Mme Gut d.i. Beaumont'"! These references are not among the sources we usually cite; all four of them indicate bibliographies of works on or connected with Freemasons. Caillet lists L'Adepte moderne with the suggested date of 1747.3 In Fesch, the description of the works ends: "s.d. (1747 or 1750)."4 This added 1750 to my list of suggested dates. The preceding item in Fesch is: Adepte (L') Maçon ou le vrai secret des Francs-Maçons. In-8°, Londres, 1747. This appears to be merely an inaccurate description of L'Adepte moderne, probably due to some copyist's slip of the pen, and not needing to be followed up. (It does, however, illustrate, at the simplest level, how phantom titles can creep into reference works.) Since Gason does not explain why the dates suggested by Wolfsteig and Taute should be dismissed as "fausse" or "fantaisiste," I noted them as possibilities. A more persistent search in the catalogue of the British Library then revealed the presence of L'Adepte moderne, under the heading "Freemasons (Appendix)," with the date given as "(1760?)." So I now had five suggested dates: 1747, 1750, 1760, 1777, and 1780. There was also the possibility that the novel had been translated from a German work published in 1770. Here I should mention that when my copy was shown to various knowledgeable dix-huitiémistes, they agreed that it looked "right" for a work produced at some point between 1747 and 1780 but could see...