A recommendation for a female Bengal novelist from a leading lexicographer
Letter signed.
8vo (127 x 203 mm). 2 pp on bifolium.
€ 350.00
A letter from one of France's leading lexicographers and men of letters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries discussing the playwright Alexis Wafflard (1787-1824) and recommending the novelist Louise Brayer de St-Leon (1765-1835). Pougens was blind from the age of 24 but this did not diminish his literary or scholarly output. His autograph signature on this dictated document is clear, its idiosyncratic form bearing witness to his condition.
It is addressed to the physician and academic Hippolyte Royer-Collard, later president of Académie de médecine from 1848. At the time, Royer-Collard, a proponent of the July Revolution of the previous year which had replaced the restored Bourbon monarchy with the constitutional rule of the "Citizen King" Louis-Philippe, was employed as an administrator in the division of fine arts of the Ministry of the Interior. Pougens begins with remarks on Wafflard, "à qui nous devons tant de jolies pièces de theâtre", continuing a discussion from a previous letter of a few days before, before turning to the subject of "Mademoiselle Louise Brayer de St Leon, Indienne, dont la maison a été ravagée par les cosaques et qui a enrichi notre litérature de tant d'ouvrages qu'on a traduit dans les principales langues de l'Europe". Pougens believes her work worthy of a pension, and feels that this should be in the power of the Ministry.
Wafflard was known for his comic plays that satirised bourgeois mores, while Louise Brayer de St Leon, a native of Chandannagar in West Bengal, was a writer of novels in the gothic-romantic vein. The background to the dramatic circumstances alluded to by Pougens are unfortunately not known.
Pougens' life spanned both sides of the Revolution and revealed him as a man of multifaceted talents. Born the illegitimate son of royalty, he received an excellent education and distinguished himself through his learning from an early age. He began work on an etymological dictionary of French, which although never fully published, provided valuable notes for later scholars. He saw diplomatic service in Rome and London, and after the Revolution he became a bookseller, translator, printer and librarian, being charged with preparing a library for Napoleon's Egyptian campaign. Blinded by smallpox from the age of 24, he was forced to carry out his work with the aid of assistants, but this did not prevent him from achieving a prodigious level of scholarly production.
A testimony to the remarkable connections throughout the literary world and the twists of fortune in the lives of people of letters.
Lightly browned with age and creased from folding, name of addressee on the reverse with remains of a red wax seal and postmark (03 May 1831). Small tear to reverse from opening. Writing clear and elegant. And additional "Pougens" added in pencil by a later hand on signature page.
