Lettres a la Presidente & Poesies erotiques (review)

La Présidente in question here is Apollonie Sabatier (née Aglaé-Joséphine Savatier), a Parisian courtesan who hosted a salon frequented for a number of years by several of nineteenth-century France's creative talents, among them Flaubert, Maxime du Camp, Ernest Feydeau, Baudelaire, composer Ernest Reyer, and Gautier. In the first part of this volume, Savatier has gathered together seventy-eight letters that Gautier wrote to her between 1849 and 1860. One is the infamous Lettre d'Italie, a lengthy, stercoraceous, and no doubt highly fictionalized account of his trip through the Italian peninsula in 1850. Although, as Savatier shows in his catalog of previous editions, there have been frequent, generally private printings of this epistle since Sabatier's death in 1890, it is hard to understand why. The text is obscene without any of the verve that writers like Rabelais knew how to use obscenity to enhance, and in the end seems lifeless rather than exciting. There is also a two-page account of the poet's 1859 excursion to Russia. The other seventy-six letters run no more than a few sentences each, and generally consist of responses to Sabatier's requests for tickets to plays or operas that Gautier was reviewing. In that respect, they provide an interesting sampling of what was to be seen in Parisian theaters from 1849 to 1860, but it must be admitted that they offer no insight whatsoever into Gautier's life or thought. One would search in vain for any of the aesthetic theorizing that makes the correspondence of contemporaries like Flaubert so fascinating.

The poésies érotiques are almost equally devoid of substance. A few, such as "Musée secret" and "Solitude," are mildly interesting, but again, most are short and forgettable. As with the letters, Savatier does a wonderful job of editing these texts, providing all known variants from all editions and manuscripts and elucidating any references. As with the letters, however, one has to wonder who, other than the most devoted Gautier scholar, would find any interest in these poems, and what even those devoted Gautier scholars would get out of either the epistles or the poems that might add to their knowledge of the author of Emaux et Camées and the work that makes us remember him.

And yet, this volume has a very real merit, even if it does not derive from its very fine presentation of the largely valueless Gautier texts that constitute its core. In his forty-page Introduction, Savatier sets about defending Sabatier's intelligence and wit against those who have dismissed her as nothing but an available sex object. Writing with a grace and charm that won over at least this reader, Savatier uses his considerable command of contemporary texts to marshal a convincing defense of the often-maligned Sabatier. While she may not have been another Mme Arman de Caillavet, nor her salon the equal of that hosted by Anatole France's Egeria, she was evidently capable of holding her own in conversation with some of the brighter lights in the intellectual firmament of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. Savatier's Introduction therefore not only restores her her due, but also adds to our knowledge of the artistic life of nineteenth-century France. For this, and for the charm and grace with which he accomplishes it, Savatier's volume merits the attention of those interested in nineteenth-century French culture . . . even if they needn't bother with the pages that follow.