After publishing luxurious editions of Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire, Tales from my mother goose by Charles Perrault and others Extraordinary stories by Edgar Allan Poe, the Short and Long Editions have turned their lens towards the fantastic stories concocted in France.
This gives the superb French fantasy tales and short stories from the 19th centurye century, which brings together, on the word side, texts by Honoré de Balzac, Théophile Gautier, Alexandre Dumas père, George Sand, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, etc. ; and, on the image side, in color or black and white, works by artists from yesterday and today, from Rodin to Nadine Brun-Cosme, from Eugène Delacroix to Laëtitia Devernay, from Munch to Léa Louis , etc.
Printed on thick paper which does justice to the illustrations and protected by an embossed cover, the whole gives, from the first glance, a feeling of a comfortable return to the past, before revealing itself to be relevant and fascinating as you read. These 17 texts and their authors have stood the test of time, and it is not for nothing: the themes addressed and the way in which they are addressed have spoken to the collective unconscious since the dawn of time. Therein lies the timelessness and power of imaginative literature. Hence their undeniable popularity. And hence the appropriateness of (re)putting before our eyes and/or in our memory these tales and short stories written in the 1800s.
Among the best known, Leader-work unknown by Balzac, where Jacques Rivette found the inspiration for his film The beautiful hazelnut ; And The Horla by Maupassant, which describes the descent into hell of a man pursued by an invisible creature and is considered the first work of fiction to relate, from the inside, the progression of a mental disorder – the diary as a narrative mode giving access to the protagonist’s thoughts.
In the ironic and biting Frritt-Flacc, Jules Verne tells the story of Doctor Trifulgas, a hard man “only treating for cash paid in advance”, who refuses to take care of a sick person and will be… let’s say, punished for what he has sinned. With The dead woman in loveThéophile Gautier flirts with vampires, while Dumas père jubilantly mixes fantasy with burlesque (and hunting) in My grandfather’s hare. As distressing as it is short, Vera by Auguste de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam struck by his icy fall.
Finally, it is impossible to miss The Titan’s Organ by George Sand. For the literary quality of this initiatory story which, until its final point, juggles with uncertainty, the marvelous and reality, the fantastic and the rational. And because the woman of letters is the only one to have found her place in the collective. Reality (even fantastic) being what it is, a similar work, with stories from the last century, would undoubtedly display greater parity (especially since the publishing house seems sensitive to this reality: the majority of works originals created to illustrate the book are signed by women). We hope so soon?