An original edition of Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal with an original handwritten stanza from the poem Les bijoux , added by the hand of the poet, will be on sale on November 22 at Drouot in Paris. This unpublished stanza had been reported by Yves-Gérard Le Dantec (1898-1958), a great specialist of Baudelaire, in the notes and variants of the first edition of Baudelaire's works in the Pléiade. But the owner of the volume where the poet had added this stanza and his successors had so far not wished to make it public.
The Art-Valorem house which organizes the sale at Drouot has attached to the volume proposed auction an autograph letter Yves-Gerard Le Dantec, dated February 20, 1928, where he asks, in vain, the owner to make known this stanza unprecedented. "I do not need to insist on you the primary interest that represents this discovery of an unprecedented stanza of the great poet," writes Yves-Gerard Le Dantec. "I do not think there is a note, not a word, not even an unpublished letter from a man like Baudelaire who must remain unknown, that everything is interesting in what touches him. treasure, disclosure can only increase its value - assuming that is the real reason for your negative response. "
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Published in 1857, the collection The Flowers of Evil was immediately the subject of a trial for "contempt of public morality". The poem The jewels , judged obscene, were forbidden (with five other poems of the collection). The eight quatrains that compose the poem evokes a naked and lascivious woman wearing only her jewels. The poem is powerfully erotic. The ninth quatrain added by the hand of Baudelaire indicates: "And I was then filled with this Truth: / That the best treasure that God keeps to the Genie / Is to know thoroughly the terrestrial Beauty / To make spring the Rhythm and the harmony". The volume originally offered by Baudelaire to the literary critic Gaston de Saint-Valry (1828-1881) is estimated between 60,000 and 80,000 euros.