‘La Belgique même s’en est mêlée, justes cieux!’ Léon Bloy et la Belgique, I: Édition des écrits sur Léon Bloy publiés de son vivant par des Belges ou en Belgique by Émile van Balberghe, and: ‘En ai-je assez écrit de ces lettres, mon Dieu!’ Inventaire chronologique provisoire de la correspondance de Léon Bloy by Émile van Balberghe, and: La ‘Dédicacite’. Inventaire provisoire des envois et dédicaces de Léon Bloy by Émile van Balberghe (review)

In the recent Cambridge History of French Literature, Léon Bloy gets not a single mention, not even in the index. This absence would doubtless reinforce suspicion of what Émile van Balberghe terms ‘une conspiration de silence’, statistically supported, in his Introduction (p. 11) to the first of these volumes, by the paucity of references to Bloy on the internet. Even in his own lifetime, Bloy saw himself as just such a ‘victim’. Writing to Émile Verhaeren in February 1887 to thank him for an article devoted to Le Désespéré, he laments ‘la rigoureuse consigne du silence’ (Belgique, p. 37) characteristic of the critical reception of his writing. As far as Bloy’s current standing is concerned, it is more likely that he is the victim of the progressive loss of interest in the Catholic novel as a genre and in the particularities of what John Coombes has called ‘the polemical or fictional texts of Bloy’s extremist social and religious irredentism’ (see French Studies, 42 (1988), 443–57). It was not always thus: alongside Richard Griffiths’ classic 1966 study The Reactionary Revolution, Joseph Bollery and Jacques Petit produced a fifteen-volume edition of Bloy’s works (1956–75); his important correspondence with Huysmans and Villiers de l’Isle Adam appeared in 1980; and Bollery’s three-volume biography, published between 1947 and 1954, seemed definitively to supersede Albert Béguin’s pioneering Léon Bloy, l’impatient (1944).

The three volumes reviewed here might spark a revival of interest, building on Pierre Glaudes’s monumental 1999 edition of Bloy’s Journal (1892–1917) and the ongoing publication, over the last fifteen years, of his Journal inédit. What they certainly do is remind one of Bloy’s prolific output. And it is clear that the scholarly labours of Van Balberghe are only a beginning: the inventory of his correspondence is merely ‘provisoire’; it surely heralds a massive editorial project. Once he is into his stride, Bloy is writing at least two letters every day; by the early 1900s he averages sixty a month; in September 1910 alone, he sends more than a hundred; Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve were no exception to this epistolary profusion. It is all the more pathetic that he claimed virtually nobody replied: ‘c’est une merveille qu’un écrivain tel que moi […] ne reçoive jamais une lettre’ (En ai-je assez, p. 7); or, as his diary entry for 1 January 1898 puts it, ‘pas une lettre, pas un ami, pas un sou’ (ibid.). This is perhaps because, as he admitted to Henriette L’Huillier in March 1886, ‘chacune de mes lettres est une jérémiade. Je dois être un correspondant bien insupportable’ (ibid.). Many of his letters are to genuinely unknown figures ranging from relatives to neighbours. But he also writes to, among others, Bourget, Edmond de...