In an 1862 letter to Philippe Burty, some forty years after his splendid Faust lithographs, Eugène Delacroix listed various stimuli on his work. He wrote inter alia: “I saw, towards 1821, compositions by Retzsch that rather struck me.”1 What had the French artist seen? Delacroix research has successfully established Retzsch’s impact,2 although the extent of his aesthetic and compositional bearing on the lithographs needs gauging. To judge by his freehand copies of Retzsch, an original set either lay beneath his eyes or was vividly remembered (Delacroix willingly drew from memory). Whatever the case, on the recto of a now short-cropped sheet, he emulated a pensive Margaret in her armchair and the pious woman against a pillar from the cathedral (Fig. 6.1a, cf. Fig. 3.1b and 9.1). He pursued on the verso with Margaret admiring the jewels, and proffering an arm to don them (Fig. 6.1b, cf. Fig. 2.24 and 10.6). An intact sheet, used diversely again and again, further shows Martha twice at home with the casket, once in the garden seen from the back, and other feminine figures from Retzsch’s plates (Fig. 6.2). Delacroix’s earliest sketches even take stock of the witches’ Sabbath, a winged Mephistopheles, and treacherous duel, after Retzsch’s plates 22, 1, and 19 (Fig. 6.3).3 Still, we may ask, to precisely what had Delacroix access? An art lover’s item brought to France? A Bohte ware from London? Had perhaps English copies by Moses been a catalyst during his London stay as much as the surrogate Faustus he saw in Drury Lane?
Eugène Delacroix, freehand copies of Moritz Retzsch’s outline engravings, pl. 16 (Margaret at the spinning wheel), pl. 18 (woman, cathedral scene), pl. 11 (Margaret admiring the jewels) and pl. 12 (proffering her arm to Martha)
ML, RF 10215 recto and verso, Courtesy RMN GP, Paris, Photo © Michèle Bellot
Eugène Delacroix, freehand copies of Margaret (pl. 13), Martha (pl. 12, 13, 14), and a lady from the cathedral scene (pl. 18 , visible rotating the image 180°) by Moritz Retzsch
ML, RF 10340, Courtesy RMN GP, Paris, Photo © Michèle Bellot
Eugène Delacroix, early sketches for Goethe’s Faust after Moritz Retzsch, c.1821, pencil on wove paper, 19.6 × 30.8 cm
ham / fm, 1929.308, Gift of Dr. Charles L. KuhnPhoto President and Fellows of Harvard College
References to Retzsch in French journals begin only January 1824 regarding Jean-Baptiste Muret’s lithographic copies. In one of the very first press quotes, “A very distinguished artist from Stuttgart” locates rather Cotta’s publishing house than Retzsch’s native Dresden.4 While the first two French reviews follow German and English credits calling him “Retsch,” in March his identity curiously vanishes behind a double mask: geographically and chronologically closer, the French lithographer Muret steals the show; on his heels, a nameless party appears, an anonymous “English engraver” (surely Henry Moses).5 Even a year later, Retzsch is still the “unknown draughtsman.”6 Proper (yet scarce) information and correct name spelling would come to France only with the 1828 Audot copies, thanks however to the second edition established by Élise Voïart who read (and translated) German. Retzsch’s 1824 launch was hesitant, to say the least. Even Amédée Pichot in his 1825 travelogue simply styled him “a German artist.”7
Inversely, his penetrating influence held sway north of the Channel. In May 1825 the London Literary Gazette expertly noted “Retsch’s Faust and Fridolin, (especially the former) have spread his fame over Britain, as well as over the Continent.” It added that Retzsch offered a good opportunity for British artists to “distinguish themselves by copying foreign works,” and thanked “Mr. Moses for his rapidity in making that English, which but ten days before was a German curiosity in the hands of amateurs.”8 Like comments give reason to believe that British copies were effective in making him known in France. For all that, did such adjustments make the plates specifically English? As shown, the 1825 Berthoud London edition bears French features.
Similar questions are central from the viewpoint of cultural transfers and mediation instances, which often prioritize lingual translation rather than graphic culture. For such a vast and diversely mapped subject, prints’ distribution and circulation in Europe play numerous parts: when related to works of literature, they disclose unexpected literary readings. Diversely, as international language seldom requiring translation, cultural negotiation of images knows no borders. Nevertheless, images themselves undergo visible or subtle changes, more often than imagined, not only in content and captions but also in target public and meaning.9 Chapter 5 dwelt on the extent of this, crucially relating to translation and interpretation. Are these changes valid elsewhere? How do the German-language territories relate to Britain and France?
To establish the depth of historic trilateral relationships is demanding, due to disruptive events, commercial rivalry and social variances. This chapter first addresses them in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, diversely interpreted by historians: John Harold Clapham considers that economically and socially France developed slowly during the Bourbon Restoration after two decades of political disruption,10 while David Todd stresses its economy’s reactionary policies, particularly in rejection of “British” free trade.11 In a debatable context, might the direct trade of prints between German States and France have prospered at the beginning of the 1820s? Or was it supplemented by British deals? Paris clearly had no equivalent of the risk-taking Bohte. In 1830, a Giard Faust advert hailed Retzsch’s prints “until today almost unknown because of the difficulty in obtaining them.”12 Publishers’ characteristic puff aside, such phrasing is revelatory of the salesmanship involved. Strasbourg booksellers and publishers Treuttel and Würtz, dealing in contemporary French and foreign books, prints and maps, also active in Paris from 1795, established themselves in London from 1817. By comparison, they kept agents in Leipzig, Frankfurt and Stuttgart only from the 1830s.13 Whence the importance of asking how Delacroix actually laid eyes on the original, or whether what seemed Anglicised was verily English.
Reasons abound for surveying all three cultural contexts or adopting a broader view: Retzsch’s French copies may hark back to the English renderings, yet not always. Even so, some are also designed for Germany, meant for a bilingual or a German-language public, and even go back to the original prints in triangulated circulation. They trigger comparison: French copies neither boost translation of the play, as English ones did, nor predate translations, but follow, escort or supplement extant Francophone translations, occasionally acting as substitutes. Beyond collectors’ and readers’ practices, they reveal an intentional culture of imitation with variation. In social use, they parallel the stage, whereas English copies introduced theatrical features to readers’ protocol and the book itself, like Moses’s use of Cornelius’s “Dedication” as frontispiece (cf. Fig. 5.9). Conversely, connections of British editions with the stage are scarce, but for Hullmandel’s version for Berthoud Jr, a likely sequel to Soane and Terry’s Faustus: A Romantic Drama. Although material aspects of the French-language copies are less diverse or flamboyant and their time span contained (1824–30), their effect endures throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Britain’s more intense craze (c.1818–43) ended up serially standardized after the 1840s as illustrated books (see Chapter 5).
Retzsch’s reception in France thus points at triangular relations in print culture, intricate to fathom in the absence of specialized period research into printmaking and trade exchanges between France, the German States, and Britain. Book and print trade are mostly studied apart. Frédéric Barbier and Jean-Yves Mollier have led, directed or codirected expert comparative studies on book networks in industrialised Germany, France and Europe;14 Helga Jeanblanc fathomed Germans in the Parisian book industry and trade;15 yet study of trilateral relations is singularly lacking. Similarly, close printmaker links between London and Paris after 1815 form an under-investigated commercial terrain. Tim Clayton and Sheila O’Connell address the subject to 1815, bearing on caricature.16 Rolf Reichardt’s work is centred on the French Revolution. Stephen Bann newly discusses French print culture yet from 1863.17 Noteworthy exceptions are Antony Griffiths’s numerous expert studies on comparative print culture. Two excellent books have straddled new ground, drawing attention to the prints’ numerous uses, including copying.18 Some of the details reported here may contribute to a field of research where much remains to be addressed.
Retzsch in France also needs better mapping. Regular catalogues of Faust-related material mostly limit themselves to the Audot and Giard editions, neither fittingly nor fully. This may be due to French bibliographies of the time (by Jacques-Charles Brunet, Joseph-Marie Quérard, Georges Vicaire) mentioning only one Audot edition. The first French copy of Retzsch by Muret is at present (March 2023) diversely dated by the BnF catalogue, and generally considered tardier. Atkins notes “in 1823 there appeared in Paris a reprint of the outlines in octavos and 16mos,” attributing them to Audot (after former references),19 which hardly fits issued items. French translations of Goethe’s Faust have been regularly studied since 1902.20 However, that a Retzsch plate serve as frontispiece to Nerval’s celebrated translation in 1828 has been much neglected (Fig. 6.4). Tellingly, it first emerges as late as 1898, as a rarity in discussion between cognoscenti in France, simply because the frontispiece of that translation’s second edition (more commonly after Rembrandt) is investigated.21 In the 1828 Motte-Sautelet folio decked with Delacroix lithographs, Stapfer (echoing Goethe) mentions Retzsch as the artist who best captured the salient scenes of Faust. Still, he considers his plates “mere outline sketches, generally a little cold” (de simples croquis au trait, en général un peu froids) of Flaxmanic rigidity.22 Such mentions are seldom acknowledged, save by Ségolène Le Men.23 In a long “Art Note” on Faust, more preoccupied with painting than graphic works according to characteristic nineteenth-century standards, A.-J. Pons considers only Cornelius (to whom he oddly attributes twenty-four prints) and Delacroix, with no mention of Retzsch.24 There is something peculiar about this denial of Retzsch in France. Lea Marquart’s thorough study, one of the latest on Faust reception in French theatre, is typical in this sense: it signals only one Audot edition, never tackling Retzsch’s impact on stage sets, costumes or actors’ bearing.25
Pinéas, Faust signe le pacte avec Méphistophélés, engraved copy of Moritz Retzsch’s pl. 4 used as frontispiece to Nerval’s translation, in Faust: Tragédie de Goëthe, nouvelle traduction complète, en prose et en vers, par Gérard (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1828)
BnF, Réserve 8-Re-13257, Paris
This chapter will engage these questions with evidence: again and again, from 1824 to 1830, French publishers Auvray, Audot and Giard had Retzsch’s plates copied for the French market either by lithography or engraving. Three editions in six years (of which one twice republished with textual additions) prove all the more considerable as they read diversely and addressed distinct publics. Although they mostly come to us as bound albums, they were originally either prints in wrappers or booklets with adjacent text, smaller or wider margins. As a stepping-stone to the Continent, they lead us further, to nearby Belgium. Retzsch’s European reception was on the cards.
6.1 Retzsch by Muret for Artists, Readers, and Print Collectors
The first of these is a set of twenty-six loose landscape prints, lithographed by water-colourist Jean-Baptiste Muret (1795–1866) for printseller Auvray. In plain, Retzsch-like frames, numbered top right as previously, and on buff paper with wide margins, they elegantly bear short italicized captions. Systematically signed “Muret,” they are sometimes marked “Lith. printed by Villain,” i.e., François Villain who would prove industrious in reissuing Delacroix’s lithographs after Charles Motte. On the front cover of their plain brown wrap (23 × 29.2 cm), the title Faust and the publisher’s imprint appear within a palmetto-decorated rim.26 Most exemplars traced have since been bound.27 No introduction nor title refer to either Goethe or Retzsch, and initial order is respected (the cathedral precedes the duel). The witch’s kitchen (pl. 6) is altered in a way similar to Moses’s, the naked damsel amorously sprawling on her bed, but God amongst angels does appear in Heaven (pl. 1). The handling blends British and German treatments.
Muret, a well-chosen French counterpart to Moses, had a skilful, linear style, ideal for rendering Retzsch. He contributed c.30 of the 315 lithographs to Baron Vivant Denon’s grand project Monuments des arts du dessin chez les peuples tant anciens que modernes (between 1816 and 1820), which acquainted him with a large number of artists and numerous styles. Muret was employed at the Numismatic Cabinet from 1830 to his death, and copiously drew antiquities from various collections across Europe for the Recueil des monuments antiques, a large assortment of original drawings, critically edited online at present.28
If in style Muret is akin to Moses, the lithographic medium brings him closer to the 1825 London copies by Hullmandel for Berthoud Jr with all significant details (God, the magic-mirror sylphid, male private parts, and location of pl. 18) perfectly matching Berthoud’s. As said, Hullmandel himself is related to France in a number of ways. In which direction was influence exerted? Accurately dating Muret’s version proves all the more vital, as at present and for no apparent reason this copy is inaccurately dated 1820, 1830, or c.1840 (BnF). The correct Bibliographie de la France date of 3 January 1824 is corroborated by several press reviews.29
Influence is then as bi-directional as trilateral: it is rather Muret who inspired the smaller and cruder London version, lithographed by Hullmandel. A telling Muret detail shows two horn-like locks above God’s brows, strongly reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Moses descending from the Sinai with the Tables of the Law, karan in Hebrew (both horned and radiant). A year later, Berthoud’s deity (cf. Fig. 5.15) refers back to Muret’s and his wild tufts of hair (Fig. 6.5), rather than the opposite. Still, Muret’s version has in turn been shaped both by Moses’s copies (in gender and sexualised issues) and the original German (by showing God in Heaven, contrary to Moses). Since the Counter-Reformation, Roman Catholicism encourages representation of the divine, particularly significant in France where it must compete with Republican iconography. One press review mentioned God “as he is pictured everywhere, in images of Catholic faith.”30 When God vanishes in Audot’s versions, his fading has an altogether different significance.
Jean-Baptiste Muret, Méphistophélès obtient de Dieu la permission de tenter Faust, lithographic copy of Moritz Retzsch’s pl. 1, in Faust (Paris: Auvray, n.d. [1824])
BnF, 8-RIC-71, Paris
Egged on by financial incentive, emulation culture was effective. Muret’s pen lithographs answered connoisseurs’ demand to have the “London engraver’s work” copied at a cheaper price.31 Praised for charm and accuracy, Muret imposed his own personality. He brings forward Margaret’s appeal by heightening her bodily charms, stresses objects of piety, and introduces subtle ornamental details to her room (Fig. 6.6). He grants extra tension to the kiss scene by retouching facial expressions and hair. His characters are more passionate and expressive, Mephistopheles is doted with further malevolence and animalism.
Jean-Baptiste Muret, Marguerite dans sa chambre, lithographic copy of Moritz Retzsch’s pl. 9, in Faust (Paris: Auvray, n.d. [1824]), to compare with Fig. 9.6
BnF, 8-RIC-71, Paris
Print collectors’ demand was one stimulus, another was publication of the first two French translations. The very first, by Albert Stapfer son, in a collected edition of Goethe’s plays, issued partly by Auguste Bobée, partly by Auguste Sautelet, had come out one year before, in January 1823. The second, by Louis-Clair Beaupoil Comte de Sainte-Aulaire, was published in Ladvocat’s famous theatre series (October 1823).32 Both Pierre-François Ladvocat and Sautelet were associated with the romantic school. Thanks to them, Faust in translation was in vogue, being read and talked about. La Pandore’s review opened with a double reference to foreign literature admirers and the play’s originality, Muret granting it extra presence. His prints did not have to take up cudgels for Faust as Moses’s had done in London; they visually heightened rather than triggered readers’ awareness. Still, depending on journalists’ culture and acuteness, reviews might typically echo Germaine de Staël on the play’s audacity and wildness. The genre of “this extraordinary poem” was blatantly unstable. The abandonment of dramatic conventions erred beyond “tragedy” or “drama,” advanced “melodrama” with much circumlocution, and “dramatic novel” seemed appropriate. In a safer chronological perspective, French commentators turned to Doctor Faust’s fabled biography by Widman (sic for Georg Rudolf Widmann), and Faust as inventor of printing. Literary references piled up, sporadically fuelling new and older myths. Whether bogey narrative, Goethean scenario, or marvellous tale, Margaret always provided a first-rate storyline for writers with verve.
Little is known about Auvray, one of the “Rue Saint-Jacques” printsellers, who also dealt in maps, occasionally in partnership, from fluctuating Paris addresses. A namesake had been active in Nantes, Petite Rue des Carmes, around 1784.33 To imagine his premises as a fashionable gallery-like shop after Henry Monnier’s delightful Marchand d’estampes (1826) seems far-fetched. Auvray operated from n° 5 quai Voltaire, on the left bank of the river Seine, directly across from the Louvre, an area well known for its antique dealers and bouquinistes. His Faust prints were also available at Lecouvey’s, under the “great vault” close to Palais-Royal shopping arcades that attracted the wealthy elite and genteel middle class, amid theatres, eating-houses, gambling dens, and brothels. The Gazette de France, regularly printed at 5 Rue Christine by Pillet aîné, ran a long article, footnoting that Pillet also held Muret’s prints for sale. At 12 Francs (more than twice a worker’s daily salary) their price drew customers in vagrant markets. Slightly reduced, the lithographs were reissued by “Auvray Frères,” this time with two addresses, 11 quai Malaquais and 5 quai Voltaire, yet no date. They belong in fact to the 1827–28 Faust craze as shows an ad on the back cover of Nerval’s translation, already printed in November 1827 (cf. Fig. 6.7b). As produced by “Villain and Muret from the original German,” they obviously competed with Audot. The previous error “Villin” on plate 11 was corrected to “Villain”.
The lithographs attracted a varied public of collectors, artists, and Faust enthusiasts (one Speck exemplar bears pencilled references on nearly every plate, perhaps to a translation) and introduced new readers to Faust with the help of articles recapping the story. Several press reviews used the expression “for the gentleman’s portfolio” in response to connoisseurs’ demand for a French version, and pointed to yet another category: artists looking for striking scenes and curious incidents might thereby train their hand. More than graphic artworks explaining or illuminating the play, they had become archetypes, models, templates. In 1821 Dibdin had embraced that task with his Tour, employing scissors and John Byfield’s woodcuts (cf. 4.4a–c). Copying, the very reason for Retzsch’s flow and circulation, would be de rigueur, a drill to practise.
Uncertainty on how to name them (“sketches,” “futile lithographs,” “a graphic poem”) may reflect French commentators’ relative linguistic uneasiness with the outline manner. Muret’s prints may not have met with the fervour Retzsch had kindled in the UK. When praised, aesthetic standards differed, yet one reviewer mentioned “Gérard, Horace, and Charlet,”34 and swore he would be damned if these “poets did not subscribe to so fertile compositions”—an indirect allusion to the outlines’ philosophical or poetical purport.35 Giard’s edition, and later Théophile Gautier’s comments on avant-garde theatre genres, would revive the poetic concern. Some regretted a lack of shadows (Le Corsaire), others spoke of “engravings” (gravures) overlooking their lithographic technique. Theatre was to follow with further applications and fresh remediation of the pliable Retzsch.
6.2 Three Little Audot
“Faust will be successively represented on every Parisian stage,” wrote Gérard de Nerval introducing his translation in 1828, by then third on the market, “and it will probably be a curious thing, for all those who will see it performed, to access in parallel the German masterpiece.” The stage versions, he added, would bank on dramatic effect, hardly developing either the philosophy “in the first part” or “original passages of the second part.”36 Both parts referred to one and the same play, Faust I, comprised in Nerval’s view of two destinies, the protagonist’s truth-seeking tragedy and young Gretchen’s story. The argument was sound. By November 1827, when his own translation as by “M. Gérard” appeared (dated 1828), “the Faust year” (l’année Faust) was still in full swing.37 Delacroix had sent Mephistopheles Appearing to Faust to the Salon and was completing his lithographs; composers François-Adrien Boieldieu, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Hector Berlioz were engrossed with the subject; three open letters on Goethe had appeared May and June in Le Globe newspaper; and the stage had been quick to follow suit. Emmanuel Théaulon’s Faust, a “lyrical drama in three acts,” had opened at the Nouveautés on 27 October 1827.38 In a few years, Paris had become a “Faustian junction” and Goethe’s script a new resource for commercially successful melodrama as well as a reference in French romanticism.39
Given the taste for drama, Retzsch’s set, of numerous theatrical virtues, was a sure card in publishers’ hands. Nerval’s very translation promoted its visual appeal. Its original bright orange covers caught the eye, tendering the title in a particular setting of elongated hexagons (Fig. 6.7a). The back cover touted the second edition of Muret’s lithographs (by Auvray Frères) as a precious complement to the translation (Fig. 6.7b): “Although the designs are only in contour, they possess a very remarkable truth of expression, and become the natural match of this new Faust edition.” Dondey-Dupré served as yet another commercial outlet for Auvray. The translation itself opened on Retzsch’s plate 4 as engraved frontispiece (cf. Fig. 6.4), a copy shamelessly signed “Pineas fec.” (for fecit, i.e., made or conceived). An obscure illustrator, Pinéas would self-publish in 1848 twenty lithographic plates as exercises on linear drawing and ornament.40 Press recommendations of Retzsch’s outlines as excellent drill tools had not been lost. Yet, despite Nerval’s claims that his translation would enhance the play’s philosophy, the frontispiece was captioned “Faust signs the covenant with Mephistopheles,” ignoring the wager proposed by Mephistopheles in Heaven and its parodied version in Faust’s study. In his preface Nerval himself had used the term pledge (pacte).
Front and back orange paper covers of Nerval’s translation advertising Muret’s second edition by Auvray Frères. Faust: Tragédie de Goëthe, nouvelle traduction complète, en prose et en vers, par Gérard (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1828)
BnF, Réserve 8-Re-1325, Paris
French reception was openly biased but already richly intercultural, aligning book and print trade with theatre. Nerval’s long-life attachment to the stage precedes even his translation, which would go through several versions and corrections. In point of fact, young Gérard was not above imitation or reference. His introduction quotes heavily from Germaine de Staël (he owes her his motto), and his translation partly echoes Stapfer’s.41 As Dédéyan has shown, Goethe’s flattery on Nerval’s translation (“I never better understood myself but thanks to reading you”) is a legend upheld by his close friend, Théophile Gautier.42 Ars simiae was in the air, not only in graphics. Text preyed on precedent.
Hence prominent demand for Audot’s Faust. Vingt-six gravures d’après les dessins de Retsch in social, literary and artistic contexts. Nerval’s intuition proved correct. The 29 October 1828 première of Faust by Antony Béraud, Jean-Toussaint Merle and Charles Nodier triumphed at Porte-Saint-Martin theatre with Marie Dorval (Toussaint’s wife) as an exquisite Marguerite and Frédérick Lemaître an awe-inspiring Mephistopheles. In a letter to Weimar chancellor Friedrich von Müller, Count Karl Friedrich Reinhard, Goethe’s friend, described the impact Retzsch’s prints had had on the actors.43 Retzsch’s icons, however reworked by others, proved a key to onstage events especially since they had inspired sets and costumes. Other fanciful, even tongue-in-cheek, Fausts were to follow, such as the Gaîté extravaganza Le Cousin de Faust (Faust’s Cousin, 13 March 1829) with a “ballet of winged creatures” (ballet des Volatiles); Faust, ou Les Premières Amours d’un métaphysicien romantique (Faust; or, The First Love Affairs of a Romantic Metaphysician, Pélicier and Chatet, 1829), a cascade of adaptations: adapted from Goethe by Rousset, who adapted Barbier; Lesguillon’s Méphistophélès, rehearsed but censured, would only be staged in 1832 under the reign of Louis-Philippe. Spohr’s Faust opera premièred on 20 April 1830, and Louise Bertin’s half-French half-Italian Fausto: Opera semi-seria in quattro atti at Théâtre Italien on 8 March 1831.44 Audot’s landscape booklets were ideal for the theatre vogue: they would fit a pocket, hide in a pouch, tuck into a suit, in marked contrast to Delacroix’s lithographs, set in the luxury Motte-Sautelet folio published February 1828.
Indeed, they were minute (c.11.6 × 13.6/14.1 cm) in the mostly cropped bound versions of preserved exemplars (Fig. 6.8), although Audot also issued a large paper version.45 In all cases images are diminutive, from 7.3 × 9.6 cm for the biggest to 6.6 × 7.5 cm for the smallest. Motif handling mirrors Kennerley’s plates, issued 1826 in London by Bulcock to accompany any octavo Faust. The first edition in May 1828 was an instant success, a second following in September, a third in 1829. The copies, with longhand captions, were advertised as “lovely engravings” (jolies gravures) executed by Trueb, an unidentified craftsman, and illustrator Jean-Antoine Branche, “one of our best engravers.”46 Branche was close to the theatre to wit his outline lithographs after the 1831 production sets for Robert le Diable.47 His copies after Retzsch may have spawned the latter commission.
Faust. Vingt-six gravures d’après les dessins de Retzsch, second and third edition with the Voïart preface (Paris: Audot, 1828 and 1829)
BnF, Paris, Author’s photograph
Louis-Eustache Audot, a bookseller and scribbler in one, had a goal, vulgarisation. His Encyclopédie populaire, ou Les sciences, les arts et les métiers was patently Available to All Classes (mis à la portée de toutes les classes) (1828–29), and his Musée de peinture et de sculpture, one franc par fascicle, with texts in English and French, gave visual access to Louvre and other European museums’ treasures. His few extant announcements-cum-catalogues between 1826 and 1829 show he had specialized in horticulture, good husbandry, sundry practical and technical subjects, adding art to his wares, particularly Canova’s and Goujon’s outlines. Once he had tested a product’s success, he printed at Rignoux’s for a European market. In May 1828, with the first edition out, he tried an eye-attracting cover (Fig. 6.9) on the same principle as Berryman’s pink version for Bulcock (cf. Fig. 5.17). Four motifs meet: Faust and Margaret kissing (pl. 15); the magic-mirror demon with drapery (pl. 6–7); and Mephistopheles grinding his teeth at Faust (pl. 23) while the witch’s cat rubs against his leg (pl. 7). In a dramatized gothic triptych or lay rétable, the demonic drapery serves as proscenium. Niched in an apse, the lovers abandon themselves to a passionate embrace, Mephistopheles taunts and menaces them on the right, the demon hovers centrally above the very title, threatening disaster. This mock altarpiece sums up Margaret’s fate. Audot’s booklet is a fake shrine to her lost virginity, and a sure lure.
Anonymous eye-catching Audot cover to Faust. Vingt-six gravures d’après les dessins de Retsch (Paris: Audot, 1828)
BnF, 8-RIC-2, Paris
The first edition still misspelt the artist’s name (Retsch), offering an unsigned 4-page note. In fewer than three months, the tables turned thanks to Élise Voïart, writer of historical works, fiction and children’s books, and prolific translator from German and English into French. She quoted Nerval’s translation and, using the plates, elaborated on key scenes in a long “Introduction.” Herself a water-colourist, she knew the pull of pictures. The price climbed from 2 to 2.50 Francs, confirming that text sold for less than images. Voïart’s interpretation, available as a separate brochure to “the purchasers of the first edition at 50 centimes,” will also have served as a universal and widespread digest of the play’s obscurer passages. The booklets coupled with trustworthy translations, and echoes of Böttiger’s approval of Retzsch, correctly named, trickled in. Paralleling the press, Audot touted expressive and graceful drawings, low price and Retzsch’s European fame. Obviously, at only 2 Francs, Faust was a gold mine, while the press boosted extensive demand. Audot’s catalogue still offered it along with Retzsch’s Hamlet, Fridolin and The Dragon in 1838, Faust gripping the Francophone market for a long time yet.
Inside, Gretchen’s story gained new subtitles. Auvray had inaugurated in 1824 a longhand caption for every Muret print, contrasting with the brief Boosey labels also bunched together in a “List of Plates.” Yet several look suspiciously matter-of-fact as if translated from the English and loosely sketching the plot, toning down the supernatural but elaborating on Mephistopheles, cast as schemer. Audot’s seamless captions marked a difference: they expound plot, present characters, offer explanation, tip in psychology, and link consequence to cause. Comparison by translation of a Margaret sequence in all three versions is telling:
(pl. 8). Faust sees Margaret for the first time. (BOOSEY = AUVRAY)
Faust meets Marguerite for the first time and offers her his arm and company, which she refuses. (AUDOT)
(pl. 9). Margaret in her chamber. (BOOSEY = AUVRAY)
Marguerite, back home, thinks of the handsome cavalier she has met. (AUDOT)
(pl. 10). Faust introduced into Margaret’s chamber by Mephistopheles. (BOOSEY)
Mephistopheles introduces Faust to Marguerite’s room and leaves a casket in her wardrobe. (AUVRAY)
Faust enters Marguerite’s room in her absence. Mephistopheles leaves a casket in her wardrobe. (AUDOT)
(pl. 11). Mephistopheles Leaves Rich Ornaments in Margaret’s Chamber. (BOOSEY) (Changed in 1821: Margaret admiring the jewels left by Mephistopheles)
Marguerite discovers the casket. (AUVRAY)
Marguerite admires her jewels. (AUDOT)
(pl. 12). Margaret shews her treasures to Martha. (BOOSEY)
Marguerite shows her jewels to her neighbour Martha. (AUVRAY)
Marguerite’s mother having given the casket to the church, Faust has introduced a new one. Marguerite shows it to her neighbour Martha, who advises her to keep it. (AUDOT)
(pl. 13). Mephistopheles informs Martha of her husband’s death. (BOOSEY = AUVRAY)
Mephistopheles visits Madame Martha and commits her to receiving Faust in the presence of Marguerite. (AUDOT)
(pl. 14.) The decision of the flower. (BOOSEY)
Marguerite plucks a flower to see whether Faust loves her. (AUVRAY)
Marguerite in Madame Martha’s garden plucks a flower to see whether Faust loves her. (AUDOT)
(pl. 15). Margaret meets Faust in the summerhouse. (BOOSEY)
Faust and Marguerite in a summerhouse. (AUVRAY)
Marguerite has hidden in the garden lodge. Faust has followed her. They are told that it is time to separate. (AUDOT)
(pl. 16). Margaret disconsolate at her spinning wheel. (BOOSEY)
Marguerite despairs of Faust’s absence. (AUVRAY)
Marguerite weeps after the absent Faust. (AUDOT)
As Nerval had pointed out, text was crucial, and the Audot booklets built on that, expanding the product’s appeal. Audot probably wrote himself the first edition’s “Note on Faust” (though Nerval might just be to blame), mingling legend, praise of Goethe, and Nerval catchphrases. The doctor’s evil deeds culminated in magical books he “had composed with Beelzebub’s help and infinitely multiplied” and “a list of his books on magic” compiled by “a bibliographer.” Nerval was fascinated by the motif. Beware of books … but buy one! Touted as “the German Shakespeare,” Goethe had presented in his dramatic poem “the vanity of human knowledge, the peril of delving too far into studies too strange, lastly how a man acts under the demon’s influence.” Audot counted on readers’ curiosity and cultural transfer. Assimilating Goethe to Shakespeare, Homer and Dante, had already emerged in Stapfer’s preface. Hagiography was in the air.
Audot had captured the market, each further release offering something special, as Boosey had done in London. The second edition (September 1828) met with the success of the Porte-Saint-Martin Faust (premièring 29 October 1828): the press recommended the booklet as “indispensable to familiarity with Faust,” publishing etching ads and stage reviews in parallel.48 The booklet was available at the publisher’s, from bookseller Bezou on Boulevard Saint-Martin, close to the theatre, or 7 Cour des Fontaines, outlet for Barba, who also published theatre annals. Etchings and stage worked hand in hand, scene by scene.
The third bilingual edition combined French captions with original German lines for a multilingual audience, and travelled outside France to bring home a distinct echo of the French craze.49 Retzsch’s appeal met that of Voïart, who had adapted in translation many a sentimental novel by Auguste Lafontaine. Also in 1828, Audot launched Retzsch’s Shakespeare Gallery, immediately triumphant in London, with Hamlet issued first, copied on steel by Branche to better effect than the Faust plates.50 In 1829, he imported (via the UK rather than from the German States) Schiller’s Fridolin with Retzsch’s outlines on the same formula (copies after Retzsch, line per line Voïart translation, French and English captions). The idea mimics Charles Tilt’s Fridolin, published in London in J. W. Lake’s translation (1829), with captions in English and French, but printed in Paris by Rignoux, Audot’s very same printer. For enterprising booksellers with scribbling skills such as Audot, books and engravings were less the outcome of intellectual exchange than an upshot of editorial patterns validated by inter-continental exchange: manipulated artefacts, critical for reception.
The 1829 French Fridolin consolidated Retzsch’s reputation and referred to Cotta’s commission of the artist. Retzsch’s art resonated in all three countries. Voïart hyped his idiosyncrasies in a somewhat affected style: “the clever draughtsman did not impose on himself the order adopted by the poet, he took delight in painting scenes Schiller had not at all described.” He “made up for silence” and “characterized with singular vigour that very kind of monstrous creature, half human, half demon.” Even his dragon (in Le Dragon de l’île de Rhodes after Schiller’s Der Kampf mit dem Drachen) was typical of Germany’s sublime and naïve poetry.51 Contrariwise, for Ralph Waldo Emerson “Retzch [sic] is a Gothic genius [—] not the Greek simplicity but the Gothic redundancy of meaning & elaboration of details.”52 Although appreciation diverged either side of the Atlantic, French papers now spelled Retzsch correctly, and the Journal des artistes even talked of “the great drawings of the German artist, almost equally estimated to the ones by Flacmann [sic, meaning Flaxman] for Dante.” Flaxman had only been recently published in France. True, as pointed out, the booklets’ low price also counted. By contrast, Delacroix’s drawings were “incorrect” and “extravagant,” Goethe’s poem overestimated, a “shapeless” or “failed work.”53 Retzsch alone held the key to understanding and appreciating Faust.
Meanwhile, rays had replaced God surrounded by angels in adoration on clouds, strongly hatched to indicate depth. They gave a strange woodcut quality to the engravings (Fig. 6.10), criticized in the Journal des artistes and contrasted with Branche’s delicate engravings on steel for Retzsch’s Hamlet. The Journal did not wish to mar Retzsch’s growing fame without clarifying however why the representation of God had vanished, in the likes of Kennerley’s prints, yet not exactly to respect piety, as in Britain. Beaming celestial radiance represented the Supreme Being in the iconography of the French Revolution (Fig. 6.11), noted 1836 Karl Rosenkranz, German pedagogue and Hegelian philosopher, who further attributed the change to a natural leaning of the French towards abstraction.54 Another possible explanation might be “God is the sun!” in the Illuminati tradition opposed to (religious) obscurantism and superstition. Illuminism was dear to Gérard de Nerval, who had discovered early in life many an occult volume in the library of his uncle, Antoine Boucher.55 The Audot copies, reliant on Nerval’s translation, reflected his recognizable prose. English religious courtesy on the one hand disputed a radical breach with it on the other. A similar iconographic treatment was of diametrically opposed significance, depending on which side of the Channel one stood. A posteriori, to a modern viewpoint, this could translate as the un-representable, which shows how dependent images are on concept.
Trueb, engraved copy of pl. 1 after Moritz Retzsch replacing God by beaming rays, in Faust. Vingt-six gravures d’après les dessins de Retsch (Paris: Audot, 1828)
BnF, 8-RIC-2, Paris
Être suprême, Peuple souverain, République française, coloured engraved print, 41.5 × 51.5 cm (À Paris: chez Basset, [c.1794]). De Vinck, 6288
BnF, Réserve QB-370 (46)-Ft 4, Paris
Despite the praise he gained, Retzsch’s finer forms had however become gross and blunted in these booklets. His whimsical details now spawned a proliferation of oddities. The suggestiveness of his outline style, giving the reader free rein to imagine the play’s poetry and metaphysics, was ceding to realism anchoring the characters in a crude and tangible world. All three Audot substitutes reduced Faust to a graph oscillating between devilry and pathos. Reaction was quick, as shows the last French copy from Giard.
6.3 A Francized Original Retzsch
Competition between Giard and the third Audot is flagrant. Notwithstanding the possibility that Audot antedate his last edition, or the checklist defer recording it, the Bibliographie de la France dated both issues 13 February 1830. Audot’s booklet, still available in 1838, may have been reissued by one of his sons, either Louis-Désiré or Louis-Joseph, who took over their father’s license in 1832, before he himself returned to the book trade in 1835.56 More decisively, a contest engaged noiselessly, yet unmistakably, on graphic and printing grounds.
The name Giard belongs to a long genealogy since the 1760s when Antoine Giard, succeeding his uncle Jean Quesnel, established himself as bookseller at Valenciennes in Northern France, to François Giard at present in Lille. From Valenciennes to Cambrai via Lille and Paris, the Giard family line embraces most aspects of the book trade: grocer-booksellers, pedlars, street vendors, and experts. In 1830s Paris close to the Mint, Institut de France, and French Academy, at 5 Rue Pavée-Saint-André-des-Arts, currently Rue Séguier, Giard dealt mainly in engravings, prints after museum galleries, maps, and topographic prints. He is listed in an 1829 trade catalogue as publisher of “all the works of Count [Alexandre] La Borde; picturesque travels in Spain, etc.”57 One of these, Laborde’s major heritage assortment Monuments de France (1816–36) was printed by top printers Pierre and Jules Didot, alias P. Didot aîné and J. Didot aîné, while Giard issued the plates and ornaments. Similar bonds also tag the 1830 Faust copy.
Faust: Esquisses dessinées par Retsch reveals a double intent: to honour Goethe’s master play and revert specifically to the original German set in the finest possible way. Giard promptly marketed it as a much-desired rarity for collectors, aiming to oust the altered Audot wares. In French terminology of the time, esquisses was the closest to Umrisse, currently named gravures/dessins au trait. Giard’s title championed Retzsch, instating ascendance over Goethe himself, whose name had simply disappeared. As advertised, the edition reproduced the plates “in exactly the same format as the [Cotta] original,” while “adding a brief account of the subject and the plot’s progress.”58 Manifestly referring to the 1820 Cotta edition in larger margins, Giard’s item further enlarged these, both for letterpress (20.6 × 27.8 cm for Cotta’s 17.8 × 22.9 cm) and plates (23.9 × 31 cm for Cotta’s 19.2 × 24.3 cm). Their difference in size is noticeable, the initial 8-page leaflet being smaller—a Parisian imitation of Cotta’s letterpress brochure, yet not designed to stand alone. It does not hold translated excerpts (a note stresses the difficulties of any translation, indirectly praising Nerval without naming him), but sizeable Faust abstracts per plate (with pl. 18, now subservient to the plot, renumbered 20, out of kilter with the Cotta set). Akin to detached captions in longhand, brief italicized sentences in abstracts allude to the plates, themselves neat proofs in thin frames, numbered atop right as the originals. The deftly designed item cost 5 Francs in paper wraps, 6 Francs in boards, under a sensational cover and a title-page I will come to.
Despite best intentions, restoration of any original is seldom done without the process reflecting later period and restorers’ mindsets. The Giard version is no exception. Like numerous hitherto neglected artefacts discussed here, it provokes analysis of its strong textual, typographical and graphic motivation—three aspects closely interrelated, seldom so prominent at the time. They beg the question of the originator’s identity.
Textually, the anonymous “Introduction” sanctions Goethe as a great poet and Faust “as that remarkable work whose merit has been recognized by Europe’s universal approval.” Such a firm conviction sounds novel for France. Much could be said about certain other interpretations, I shall not linger on those. Vitally, this unnamed writer knows Faust first hand—having certainly read it in German. The foreword focuses on Faust as inventor of print type, and explains how two distinct historical facts (Faust or Fust, printer and Gutenberg’s associate, and doctor Faust, former Wittenberg student) meet and merge in a single legend, before introducing Lessing, then Goethe, and the protagonist’s possible redemption. The recurrent French emphasis on Faust and printing is of particular weight and further supported, I argue, by typography and printing choices.
One of his last, the letterpress leaflet is by Jules Didot aîné, a descendant of the illustrious printing house. Himself an unconventional printer-bookseller and type-founder, Jules introduced bands, border ornaments and vignettes to romantic editions.59 After 1830 he transferred his printing business and foundry to Brussels and sold them to the Belgian government, before losing his reason in 1838. Both letterpress and plates, printed with particular care in the Giard set, tout Faust as forebear printer and this modern Faust as instance of legendary printing. Emmanuel Théaulon’s Faust (1827) also bore on Faust’s printing activity, and Nerval’s “Observations” to his translation ended with the same motif. By no coincidence, one act and a summary of August Klingemann’s 1815 popular romantic play, Faust, again featuring a damned Faust as inventor of printing type, would soon be presented to French readers in the Gazette littéraire, a review issued by Sautelet, also publisher of Stapfer’s Faust translation.60
The Giard edition adds to the Retzsch copies an etched title-page and sensational cover, lithographed by Alphonse Bichebois at Saint-Denis. The title-page’s mix of hand-drawn romantic lettering symptomatically combines diverse fonts and flourishes within a threefold frame (Fig. 6.12). An eye-catching plaited motif is amended by an inner arabesque of vine leaves, ivy sprigs, blossoming clusters, corner embellishments and four vignettes at cardinal points. The grotesque masks of comedy (bottom) and tragedy (left) take on demonic features atop middle (faun ears and horn-like tufts of hair). A round mirror on the right-hand side invites the reader to look at himself and consider his self-portrait as the composition’s finale. The uncanny sequence reads stylistically close to Bichebois’s title-page for Jacques Milbert’s Itinéraire pittoresque du fleuve Hudson (1828–29), where the same densely plaited motif is used.61 However, the sequence’s complexity of meaning is unusual for Bichebois, a painter who obtained a lithographic licence from Saint-Denis (where the cover was also printed) only after several requests by mayors and members of the nobility. Bichebois, known for landscapes and antiquities, lithographically transposed others’ motifs, for instance Milbert’s.62 He probably transposes here somebody else’s composition. Indeed, the inner arabesque reveals a finer understanding of Faust. The comic and tragic masks echo its twofold purport, voiced by the Poet and the Merry Person in the introductory “Prelude on the Stage,” a scene rarely understood, commented, or even published at the time. Similarly, the demonic mask reflects devilish sway over the protagonist, while the mirror invites individual readers to consider themselves, underscoring the play’s universal bearing on mankind. Such subtle interpretation is rare for the time, in this case also secret, depending not on words but a cryptic graphic motif, the mirror. Its multifaceted toying demands identification of the prefacer and his novel approach to Goethe’s play. The same may be said of the cover.
Etched title-page in Faust: Esquisses dessinées par Retsch (Paris: Giard, 1830)
Courtesy Beinecke, Yale University, Speck Ck99 R3 +830b Copy 1
The latter is based on Retzsch’s plate 1, dramatically swapping an infernal assembly for the original celestial scene (Fig. 6.13). Beneath the title in bold capitals, a gigantic fist grips as if to fling a tiny naked and agonizing human into Hell. Around it, three harpies (a pun on harpadzo, in ancient Greek to seize) gape in awe, threat or mourning, while two dragon-like canines guard the gates Cerberus-like, alongside two other diabolical creatures, one of which also contemplates the central scene in dread. The grim message is played down by comic undertones, as in the gawp of terrified monsters. The clutched hand may yet be another pun on die Faust, literally the fist in German, pointing again to the mysterious author reading the play in the original. A further assembly appears at all four corners: men in dense groups glaring at Faust’s infernal punishment engage in passionate discussion. The disorderly gatherings evoke contemporary depictions of the romantic school, such as the battle pitched by partisans and opponents at the première of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (Théâtre-Français, 25 February 1830). A few turbaned heads among these may cite the fanciful dress of several Hernani’s supporters, again alluding to Faust’s pertinence for all humanity.
Cover for the Giard edition, lithographed by Alphonse Bichebois, 18.5 × 25 cm
BMO, Estampes scènes Faust (23), Paris
Further printing of the Giard version throws up surprises. The half-morocco binding of a Speck exemplar bears four interlocked double Ls surmounted by a count’s crown between the spine’s raised bands (Fig. 6.14). It contains 68 plates on thick paper, and reads as a series of experiments in reproduction techniques, trial prints and/or artists’ proofs.63 These are: the copy’s etched title-page in its ornamental border; a first set of all 26 numbered plates etched as proofs (before letters); plates 1–21 and 23–26 lithographed and captioned (the witches’ Sabbath is missing); a proof of the sole title-page border; finally, 15 etched plates without numbers or letters. Several lithographs signed (presumably C.) Magnenat, an obscure draughtsman, are printed by George Frey, well-known lithographer for the review L’Artiste, Charles Philipon’s satirical prints, and illustrations.64 They are captioned after Muret, as if a cheaper lithographic version of Retzsch’s images had been considered (still with alterations) to succeed Muret’s, by then out of print. As in Muret and the original, plate 18 is not renumbered and precedes the duel. A few are not signed, and may be by a different hand. Whatever the case, they show that other ways of framing had been tried, modifying the scenes and their reading. Last, but not least, the final cluster of 15 corresponds to selected plates at various stages of etching. Trials explored how to highlight a scene’s main character and best render Retzsch’s slightly stronger outlines (Fig. 6.15a–b). The exemplar (with count’s crown), which does not include the sensational cover printed by Bichebois, clearly belonged to an aristocrat keen on engraving and printing techniques.
Spine with four interlocked double Ls surmounted by a count’s crown between raised bands
Courtesy Beinecke, Yale University, Speck Ck99 R3 +830b Copy 1
Trial lithograph and etching to best render Moritz Retzsch’s outlines, after plates 23 (Faust accusing Mephistopheles) and 16 (Gretchen at the spinning wheel) in the Laborde exemplar
Courtesy Beinecke, Yale University, Speck Ck99 R3 +830b Copy 1
In 1830 (the year he launched the Faust copy) Giard started issuing fascicles of Léon de Laborde and Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds’s well-known Voyage de l’Arabie Pétrée, including 23-year-old Léon’s own drawings that first acquainted the Western world with the since famous rock-carved tombs of Petra. Two of these were also engraved by Léon. Solidly trained in classics, modern languages, and later Arabic, born into a family of aristocratic intellectuals, Léon de Laborde (1807–69) was a young archaeologist, traveller, and draughtsman, keenly interested in engraving and printing. Oriented by his father towards the diplomatic service from 1828, he had studied in Germany, and Voyage de l’Arabie Pétrée is dedicated to William II, Elector of Hesse. A fine German scholar, he also authored essays on engraving.65 The Speck exemplar of printing samples strongly points at Léon as owner, also authoring the 1830 Faust “Introduction” and synopsis, and possibly conceiving the uncommon title-page and cover, revelatory of complex Faust readings.
Indeed, the second part of the 1872 auction catalogue of Léon de Laborde’s library mentions 40 exemplars of the Giard set, either in paper covers or in boards (as in the two options published), in a section titled “Works by MM. Alexandre and Léon de Laborde (in numbers),” while the first part includes yet another exemplar of proofs before and after letters, which may identify with the Speck volume.66 In neither Léon’s nor Alexandre’s bibliographies does this title appear. Alexandre might conceivably have also been candidate to the attribution. A polyglot with perfect command of German, a writer of richly engraved publications and wide interests, an independent-minded Empire statesman, Laborde father was connected to all three individuals, Giard, Didot, Bichebois. In fact, Blanc’s Protestation des députés réunis chez Alexandre de Laborde (De Vinck 11052), a lithograph printed by Bichebois in 1830, shows political figures meeting at his house in opposition to Jules de Polignac, ministerial leader of the Ultra- royalists. Alexandre had been made a comte of the Empire under Napoleon (9 January 1810) but assumed the title of marquis, purchased by his father, at the Bourbon Restoration (1815). In 1830, the title (and crest) of count already belonged to his first-born, Léon, and the two interlaced Ls on the Speck volume are the latter’s initials. Although book expert Jean-Baptiste de Proyart advertised four prime copies of books with the same crest and spine design as from their former shared library, the Speck exemplar may be safely attributed solely to Léon. He, not Alexandre, was keenly interested in engraving and lithography. In 1833, through Jules Didot, he published Essais de gravure pour servir à une histoire de la gravure en bois, starting with a daring experimental plate, “Chisel Tests” (“Essais de burin”). Several other wood engravings by himself or others, outlines and maps, along with his sketches of turbaned figures (as in the Giard Faust cover) evoke his travels. A distinct interest in grotesque, tragic or macabre atmosphere and surprising incidents, confirmed by his library holdings, permeates this “first fascicle” on engraving, due to be continued but without suit. Although Alexandre also had dealings with Giard, evidence mostly points to Léon. Further, his father’s opposition to Polignac, in self-designed uniform leading a popular insurrectional movement during the July Revolution’s troubled times, the overthrow of King Charles X, and the 1830 July Monarchy under Louis-Philippe, hint as to why the Giard edition had little echo in press reviews. It also explains why 40 exemplars may have been left untouched in the Laborde library, later to be sold at auction.
Thus, the finest Retzsch renderings in France, accompanied by a novel understanding of the play, met little demand, despite the spirited title-page, lithographic cover, and Léon’s plausible eager involvement in their making. It is the Audot booklets that many artists and writers would add to their library: to name but a few, no lesser luminaries than the English poet Bryan Waller Procter (pseud. Barry Cornwall, 1787–1874), Byron’s Harrow school fellow; French composer Auguste Vincent, pianist virtuoso, teacher and bibliophile; modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, playwright and art critic; and modernist theatre practitioner Edward Gordon Craig.67
6.4 Copies vs. Originals? The Brussels Case
Post-Waterloo Brussels deserves special attention. From 1810, it had become the growing centre of Belgian counterfeit editions (contrefaçon belge) thanks to Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic political censorship and surveillance, as well as considerable financial barriers in the French book trade.68 This expedient business, backed by successive governments, created a flourishing knockoff activity that dominated foreign markets and boosted the public’s taste for reading, regardless of whether the industrialised process endorsed or demoted the emergence of “Belgian” publishers.69 The Brussels book trade popularized mainly French literature abroad in two ways: by launching French books from the serialized novels in journals, prior to their publication in France (préfaçons belges), and by reprinting texts (as opposed to forging editions) in a different type and layout.70 Accompanying images belonged to three categories: a) copies of original images; b) engraved or lithographed prints acquired by agreement; and c) original Belgian illustrations in counterfeit editions.71 However, a school for wood engraving on a commercial basis was not founded in Belgium before 1836 with the chair for steel engraving remaining vacant.72 The Belgian Retzsch editions bring further light to this and spark aesthetic, political or commercial repercussions.
In 1828, shortly before the Belgian Revolution led to the creation of a modern state in 1830, Brussels was a bilingual city, where Latin-rooted French and Germanic Dutch met. Part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, under an enlightened Protestant monarch, William I (1815–40), it represents a buffer zone against the threat of French expansionism. In such a political and social context, Faust: Tragédie de Goëthe [sic], a “new edition” issued by La Librairie Romantique, matched romantic stance with genuine business concerns. La Librairie Romantique, at various Brussels addresses and a London branch, was a typical bookseller-cum-stationer, created in 1828 and run by Sylvain Van de Weyer with a French exile, Auguste Feuillet (who styled himself Feuillet-Dumus), would-be administrator of revolutionary journal Le Libéral.73 It also imported architecture and art books from Paris, Florence, Rome and Naples, and engaged in reprinting, mostly by instalments with alluring images, occasionally coloured. It promoted romantic Francophone writers, such as Charles Nodier, Prosper Mérimée, Benjamin Constant or Germaine de Staël, and also launched the drama series “Théâtre romantique.”
Printed in-18° on satin wove paper by Weissenbruch, “Printer to the King,” Faust bears on the title-page the political allegory “Freedom” (Liberté), a vignette of an eagle in flight against a flaring sun emerging from clouds. It relates to pre-marxist political activities by Feuillet-Dumus,74 and sponsors a romantic watchword well before Hugo’s Hernani. Feuillet-Dumus’s wife had inherited a part of the printing business from August Karl Wilhelm Weissenbruch, one of the first Encyclopaedists, whose son, Louis, was patented “Printer to the King” in Brussels. This entitlement, and Goethe’s lithographic portrait in the book from the court studio, effectively set this Faust under the monarch’s protection. Feuillet-Dumus profited from the first fifteen years of prosperity under William I and the southern provinces’ industrial revolution that strengthened the liberal bourgeoisie. The King had adopted French Revolution principles in order to subjugate the Catholic south, such as equal protection for religious creeds (in effect privileging Protestants) and the same civil and political rights for every subject. Faust thus addressed middle and upper educated classes of liberal spirit, upheld by the powers-that-were as the right of every citizen.
As such, it is a thought-provoking object since it blends material and ideas from two separate French editions on the very year of their publication. Issued in October and December 1828 at 1.25 Florins or 2.64 Francs per part,75 it adapts the Audot plates copied by Trueb and Branche in two versions (either with French or French-German captions76) to the Stapfer translation (as re-published by Motte and Sautelet in folio with Delacroix’s lithographs). Its small format (c.14.1 × 9.7 cm) confirms Audot’s primacy abroad, borrowing from the Motte-Sautelet folio a text-and-image combination prototype along with the Stapfer translation. Feuillet-Dumus had garnered inspiration from both.
Indeed, the Brussels Faust distributes the Audot plates opposite (and askance to) the matching passages, as the French folio had done with Delacroix’s lithographs. Choice prints with French captions are always on the right-hand side, those bilingual being allocated left or right to suit correlation. Whatever the result, the extensive captions oddly recap the adjacent text, the images evidencing the publisher’s sleight of hand. Variance in placing could result from the binding (all examined exemplars are bound) or from two diverse issues, as confirms Goethe’s effigy as frontispiece in two versions. In these, Feuillet-Dumus uses yet another copy, the portrait Delacroix lithographed for Motte after Johann Joseph Schmeller’s 1826 drawing of the poet.77 In one issue (HAAB: G 349), the effigy, printed by the court’s lithographic studio, is signed D. V …, identified by a note as “M. Vincent, distinguished Brussels artist.” Dominique Vincent (later Meulenbergh), half-brother of Frères Williaume, was a painter specializing in likenesses, often of court figures (Fig. 6.16a). In the other (HAAB: F 3858), the effigy is printed by the Williaume brothers, Joseph and François, who dealt in sundry counterfeit lithographs.78 The privy counsellor’s expression, romanticized to fit “an imaginative recreation of Delacroix’s idea of Goethe-the-poet,”79 has been further modified each time. Vincent gives Goethe an intense, pensive and firmer expression as he fixes the reader with a piercing glance, the Williaume deliver a gentler and sunnier rendering of broader appeal (Fig. 6.16b). A lithographed Goethe signature, reproduced below his portrait as in the French edition, but much enlarged, seals the attempt with brio, as if the author himself had authenticated it in person.
Two versions of Goethe’s portrait by Delacroix, lithographed by Dominique Vincent (later Meulenbergh) and by the Williaume brothers, in Faust: Tragédie Ornée de 26 Gravures, d’un Beau Portrait de l’auteur, et accompagnée de notes de M. de Goëthe. Traduite par M. A. Stapfer (Bruxelles: Librairie Romantique / Weissenbruch, 1828)
Courtesy HAAB, G 349 and F 3858, Weimar
Feuillet-Dumus thus put on the market two issues of Retzsch partially copied at origin (Audot < Bulcock), now inserted to an edition reprinted from the French, as counterfeit Belgian editions usually did. The Motte-Sautelet folio had also initially included a Delacroix copy of Goethe’s effigy, again copied with variations in Brussels. Into what category do these adjustments fall? A counterfeit Faust? A reprint Faust? Or an original work? If their organizing principle was original, all parts were copied. Feuillet-Dumus certainly displays a nascent publisher’s intense preoccupation to provide a romantic Faust for a new audience in a Francophone context. He combined Audot’s theatrical appeal with Stapfer’s text and Motte-Sautelet’s blend of image with text (without though the “wild” Delacroix lithographs, presumably too daring for Brussels). As such, through variation (in two differing issues), the item stands for a new creation. In a vulgarized Retzsch-copying industry, the care spent to invent yet another Faust by mustering sundry parts and ideas, indicates keenness to represent the romantic school, as Feuillet-Dumus’s catalogue repeatedly states.
In a study on illustration in counterfeit Belgian romantic editions, Marij Lambert has argued that lack of attention to the material aspects of a book and absence of illustrations confirm a perceived dearth of modern publishers in Belgium.80 Feuillet-Dumus’s Faust points however to a more complex reality. From a cultural point of view, this “nouvelle édition” (title-page) appeals to its readers quite differently from both French prototypes, even though strictly speaking it may be considered reprinted, even legally forged. At the time, copyright does not exceed a nation’s boundaries.
Its singularity stands out when compared to another two Brussels Faust editions, first by Jean-Paul Meline alone in 1833, then with associates “[Léon] Cans et Compagnie” in 1838, both well-known counterfeit publishers but also book exporters.81 Meline, born in Livorno, first established himself as bookseller in that city, then in Leipzig, before becoming one of the most important publishers in Belgium. Also benefitting from royal protection of the book trade, he printed at Adolphe Wahlen’s, “Printer-Bookseller to the Court.” By 1838 the associates had their own bookselling, printing and foundry business. With his initial bureaux in Livorno and Leipzig, Meline had covered a large part of the European market, his Leipzig antenna “supply[ing] Germany, Poland, Denmark and Russia.”82 In such an extended distributive flow of prints, Retzsch copies are to be spotted.
The 1833 edition pirates the Feuillet-Dumus Faust within Belgium itself, shamelessly naming it “third edition,” with the Audot plates either on yellow paper with French titles or white paper with French-German ones (variation persists).83 Lithographed either at the court studio or by Frères Williaume, Goethe’s likeness is reversed in some, not in others. Vincent’s name has disappeared and three lists of characters introduced (afore “Prelude on the Stage,” “Prologue in Heaven,” and the “Tragedy”). Feuillet-Dumus’s Faust, obviously deemed original—in a way it surely is—, was worth pirating and clearly in demand. Still, in the 1838 Faust, again based on the Feuillet-Dumus template, the Stapfer translation was “revised and corrected by Doctor C[arl] M[artin] Friedländer, director of the German Institution in Brussels, member correspondent of the Historical Institute of France,” and may have spread in France. Dissimilarity and variation countered publishers’ possible claims. Publishing contention accompanied the reception of Faust across Europe, Retzsch’s plates being always a coveted attraction.
It may then come as something of a surprise to see how popular would prove Meline’s counterfeits in very different and learned context. A Speck exemplar of the 1833 Faust belonged to Kuno Meyer, distinguished Celtic philologist. Founder and editor of four journals on Celtic studies, Meyer taught at Liverpool and in Ireland (he introduced the Irish public to ancient Irish poetry, entered the Royal Irish Academy, and was made a freeman of both Dublin and Cork), before joining Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. In his exemplar, pencilled manuscript comments refer mostly to the final translation notes by Stapfer, but one of them reveals that he used his book to cross-compare iconography with the first edition of Nerval’s translation (1828) and Birch’s English Faust. Another exemplar, from Harvard’s Widener library, belonged to American romantic and abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell, who succeeded Longfellow in modern languages at Harvard (teaching Spanish and French, 1855–86), edited the Atlantic Monthly (1857–61), and served as US ambassador (Spain, UK).84 As for the 1838 edition, it has entered the Germanic Collection at Princeton, founded by American businessman, weapon historian, and collector Carl Otto Kretzschmar von Kienbusch.
None of these possessors seems to have doubted their exemplars’ quality or authenticity. It may of course be argued that none were seeking genuine prototypes. They doubtless wanted to read Faust in Stapfer’s original or corrected translation (though all of them could read it in another language, and Meyer in German). In point of fact, all three specimens evince varying compilation rationales: didactic (Lowell), connoisseurship (Meyer) or putting together a collection (Kretzschmar von Kienbusch). The latter’s was based nevertheless on the expertise of Theo Feldman, “one of the best-known dealers in works related to German literature.”85 Even more surprisingly, the 1838 Faust features in a French bibliophile’s library sold at auction. Abel Giraudeau, a medical doctor, was founding member of the renowned Société des Amis des Livres, and his library held illustrated books, original editions, and art publications. His uncut copy was in a Japanese binding, the last word in bookish refinement at the end of the nineteenth century.86
It is ostensibly in various disguises (copied editions), in several garbs (materiality), and through diverse channels (provenance) that Retzsch’s copies circulated Goethe’s text freely, disregarding set ideas. Retzsch’s prints trespassed on preconceived categories.
6.5 Retzsch in French Nineteenth-Century Print Culture
English print culture around Retzsch is prolific, with novel printed items situated in a condensed time frame, but results in standardisation. Sparser but further-reaching, Francophone culture vests objects and publics with different functions both spatially and temporally. Having fathomed the first three French editions and the Brussels case in ant-like detail, let us consider a century (1840s–1940s) from a bird’s eye view.
Retzsch’s images often condition book reception for a fluctuating readership: the educated urbane German of the 1840s and 1850s; the broad (including the less fortunate) French base, enticed by cheap reading-room materials in the 1850s and 1860s; and lycée (secondary school) pupils or undergraduates from 1940 onwards. Such diversity again substantiates Retzsch’s plasticity and compliance, though with significant dissimilarities.
In 1840, eight Retzsch outlines (six from Faust I and two from Faust II) nestled on one single sheet with captions in German (cf. Fig. 6.17), a synoptic frontispiece in two columns for two ponderous editions of Goethe’s works, one selected (auserlesene), the other complete (sämmtliche Werke). The first a hefty tome, the second of five volumes, both in double-columned pages and Gothic type, plus a single, slightly smaller one-volume Faust, were all published by Baudry in Paris. By then, his European Bookstore (Baudry’s europäische Buchhandlung) had considerably expanded to an adjacent reading room and balcony overlooking the Seine river, at 3, Quai Malaquais. A bookseller and publisher active from 1815, Louis-Claude Baudry (1793?–1853) specialized in foreign books as Galignani’s main Paris rival in importing books from Britain. His Télémaque “in the six most utilized European languages” (Paris, 1837) was also available to clients’ language(s) choice, along with handbooks to study modern languages. In 1831 (or 1833) Baudry founded a “European Bookstore” series, following on his “Foreign Languages Library.” In the early 1840s, as trade in German books grew, he launched the “Library of the Best Old and New German Writers” (Bibliothek der besten ältern und neuern deutschen Schriftsteller). Goethe’s Works were volumes II to VI, issued with three portraits, eight grouped subjects after other titles, and the eight Faust outlines “after Reitsch” [sic in catalogues, yet correctly spelt in the published works], all for 50 Francs. The series would comprise “205 tomes” by first-rate writers “in 15 large in-8° volumes printed in two columns on wove paper, with portraits, engravings and facsimile” for 196 Francs.
In dense gothic type for the educated gentleman’s library, all five tomes sit in half-leather publisher’s bindings with spines elegantly decorated in gilt arabesques and crowned by a minute chinoiserie of period taste. A vast German-speaking community in Paris of 30,000 in 1841, 60,000 in 1848, and over 100,000 in 1866, although their numbers would dwindle due to political upheavals,87 was also a target public. Intellectuals, printers, book traders and other educated types would gladly read a by then consecrated author. They might not afford any classy series, but peruse it in Baudry’s reading room, then be only too happy to acquire the single Faust for 4.50 Francs.
In all three cases, the outlines grouped cartoon-like meaningful episodes (Fig. 6.17). Smaller than Retzsch’s own prints and slightly altered, they respect the German originals in detail (male crotches are unadulterated, the condensed formula resulting in miniaturization surely offering less offence to prudish eyes). They line up Faust’s pledge, his meeting Margaret, the kiss, the duel, Faust’s and Mephistopheles’s cavalcade, and Margaret’s refusal to leave prison, along with the Classical Walpurgis Night and Faust’s burial from Faust II. Centred on Margaret’s story and tragic fate, concluding with the doctor’s doom, they alter the overall meaning to emphasize a sorry state of affairs for both protagonists. Short italicized lines from Faust I enhance dramatization, contrasting the merely descriptive slogans for Faust II depictions.
Acht Umrisse zu den merkwürdigsten Scenen Faust’s gezeichnet von M. Retzsch, c.27.5 × 18 cm, eight outlines after Moritz Retzsch for Faust I and II as synoptic frontispiece for various editions of Goethe’s works (Paris: Baudry, 1840s and 1850s)
BnF & BMO, Estampes scènes Faust (14), Paris
Inserted to every Faust by Baudry, the single-page theatrical synopsis burgeoned. By 1843, the separate Faust had been through eight reprints.88 Under Louis-Philippe, last king of France, it was available, as touted its title-page imprint, at Baudry’s, Quai Malaquais (near the Pont des Arts, the Institut de France, and the Louvre), and further afield.89 A manuscript ex libris, signed L., clearly a member of the German community in Paris, bears a hybrid script for the date, “19. Juin 48,” half in German (19. instead of 19), half in French (Juin), the very year of the February 1848 Revolution and only a few days before the 23 June uprising.90 The publisher’s vignette by [Charles] Marville (a small angel sits atop a seething urn held by a siren and a triton with a bat-winged dog at their feet) may be a political cryptogram. An exemplar with copious notes, possibly by a different hand, sports the manuscript ex libris of N. J. Wyeth, probably Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth (1802–56), the American merchant inventor of the Boston ice industry and explorer of Oregon and the Northwest.91 The book travelled widely, and Faust (especially Faust II) must have matched Wyeth’s herculean efforts and modernizing ambitions in real life.
The synoptic frontispiece still held sway in 1855, when Baudry’s widow put to an already oversupplied market all three editions “entirely revised and corrected” with a new date and her imprint, dropping the price of Selected Works to 25 Francs. Even before that, three Goethe portraits and 16 grouped subjects sold independently as advertised at 5 Francs. This explains the detached frontispiece, which found its way into the Paris Opera collection “Prints after Faust scenes,” conveniently on file for stage and set arrangements. The impressive cover of the Giard edition (cf. Fig. 6.13) belongs to the same collection.
Joseph Bry’s popular “Literary Illustrated Evenings” series (“Les Veillées littéraires illustrées,” 1849–56) was meant for broad readership, in popular and bourgeois circles thirsting after literature. Eugène Sue’s hugely successful The Mysteries of Paris, published in the Journal des débats between June 1842 and October 1843, had stirred demand. Five years later, J. Bry aîné (1822–64), a print shop worker turned publisher, developed the roman de quatre sous, a quarto gathering of 16 thin pages in two columns with two wood engravings on pages one and nine at 20 centimes (quatre sous) per part. Sold weekly or monthly at modest cost, his fascicles delivered democratic reading in unhampered batches, inviting readers to compose from them bespoke volumes according to their own interests.92 The offer combined several recognized authors such as Rabelais, Tasso, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Richardson or Oliver Goldsmith, with modern celebrities, including Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, and even Charles Baudelaire, whom Bry contributed to popularize. Between 1848 and 1856, thirteen volumes of fascicles, richly “illustrated by Édouard Frère,” opened with Werther, Faust following in July 1850.
Sandwiched between Walter Scott novels, the latter is based on Nerval’s 1840 reviewed translation, his last Faust I interpretation, and a partial translation of Faust II interspersed with abstracts. For the first time, Nerval added to the Faust II ending the protagonist’s redemption through divine grace, which alters the overall meaning and importantly amends the damnation scenario. He also included Goethe’s 1830 appreciation of his own rendering, only recently brought to public attention in France, as a meaningful endorsement of his own toils. Perhaps surprisingly the humble edition is deemed pivotal in Nerval studies, since it marks a vital shift from his journalism to later inspirational work.93 It also subjugates Faust to an anonymous legendary text (in a sixteenth-century French translation by Palma Cayet) incorrectly attributed to Widmann, as if Goethe’s text itself were a fabulous continuation, particularly in Nerval’s rendering. The complex mix of legend, translation, additions, and Goethe’s commentary made for a successful marketing formula, while the cheap brochure marks a turning point in French Faust reception. Iconography grants it extra weight thanks to Frère’s reworkings and Bry’s clever layout. The high figure of its distribution (12,000 prints) benefitted from Bry’s association with Maresq and Pelvey’s “Librairie centrale des publications à 20 centimes.”94
To accommodate all Faust I material, Bry’s original formula had become a 44-page dense quarto in two columns with eleven in-text illustrations, cut by Belgian wood engraver [François] Rouget. The hyped “drawings by Édouard Frère” were in point of fact shamelessly copied from Retzsch via Muret or some other go-between at a time when, pressed by necessity, Frère (1819–86), painter, water-colourist and etcher, provided Bry’s series with some 800.95 Creating a sensation, Frère bowdlerized Retzsch, focusing on the main scenes, in black and white contrast with astute gradual shadowing, laid out to enhance effect. Appealing to the average reader, he heightened sentimental drama, and tempered grotesque, erotic or unruly details. One exemplary opening suffices here, these images being further commented in Chapter 7 as typical of extensive iconography. Four revamped Retzsch scenes, inserted to Goethe’s translated “Outside the Town Wall,” titillated well prior to related textual events: a bevy of intoxicated students supervised by a grinning Mephistopheles; Faust absorbed by the half-naked magic-mirror vision; he accosts Margaret; she studies an opulent necklace astonished (Fig. 6.18). Nerval’s note on “Widmann,” an abridged introduction to both parts, his translator’s note with Goethe’s praise, and additional Faust II paragraph on divine grace, completed the offer.
Four woodcuts after Moritz Retzsch, in Faust par Wolfgang Goethe: Traduit de l’allemand par Gérard de Nerval, précédé de la légende populaire de Johann Faust, l’un des inventeurs de l’imprimerie, illustré de jolies vignettes par Éd. Frère (Paris: J. Bry aîné, 1850), 12–13
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5293, Weimar
Results ensued. The fascicle was reprinted in 1852 and 1854. Baldensperger dates the original edition 1851, while Henning avers four editions instead of three 1850–54, and another three 1858–64.96 Joseph Bry went bankrupt on 10 May 1855 but the fascicle resuscitated in 1858, along with Werther, under the corporate name “Librairie centrale des publications illustrées à 20 centimes.” The latter was more distributor than publisher of numerous cheap publications, including “Complete Works” by Balzac, Hugo, Sand, and Sue. Bry’s price however now fetched 90 centimes. A dramatically changed header conceived by Charles Mettais disclosed a portrait of Walter Scott amid a motley collection of figures, probably from his best-selling novels, above Faust’s covenant. Mettais’s recycled image was often used as series header. In fact, popular fiction at the time (as in Paul Lacroix, alias Bibliophile Jacob’s numerous penny novels) is infused with Faustian iconography. Alchemists’ studios, prison scenes, men hanging in a row, or dark riders galloping away by night are period props influenced by Retzsch and revamped in France by Delacroix’s dark imagery. However cost-effective, images were also printed separately on fine paper as artists’ proofs for gentlemen’s and collectors’ print portfolios.97 In Bry’s fascicles, emotional iconography spices up the tales.
The significant rise in price of the 1858 Faust-cum-Werther impression draws on the work’s popularity. “Bry aîné” is given as printer with a different address. Odd caption inversions in the first four woodcuts evidence hasty printing. Gounod’s 1859 Faust also rekindled interest in Goethe’s play. The fascicle was again reissued in 1860 with fitting image captions, now printed by Jouaust et fils at 338 Rue Saint-Honoré. Interestingly, this is Charles Jouaust, whose son, Damase, would later become a reference for bibliophilic editions. As for the last Nerval translation, the fluidity of print culture resists set ideas about exclusive volumes.
Conquest of the masses in the 1850s and 1860s, thanks to such as Bry and associates, is matched nearly a century later in 1940s educational publishing. P. Labatut’s Faust edition in publisher’s boards is part of the “New Collection of German Authors” released in 1940 under the aegis of prominent secondary education teachers, two from Paris’s prestigious lycée Montaigne, a third being headmaster of the French lycée in Mainz, Gutenberg’s own city. The editor, P. Labatut, himself agrégé de l’Université, regional academic inspector, and a highly qualified tutor at Carcassonne’s lycée, had previously published Werther in this same collection with silhouette illustrations throughout (1929). The edition was launched by a key publisher in medical and scientific books, Masson et Cie, run by various members of the family since 1836, and still active under the name Elsevier Masson. Dense and informative, Labatut lengthily introduced Faust, based on focused bibliography and several reliable German and French editions of the time. Bountiful notes in Gothic print fathom language, ideas and poetry, in all likelihood for higher lycée classes and university undergraduates. Among the painters and engravers mentioned, Retzsch is first referred to. Well-known Faust iconography illustrates the introduction (after Rembrandt, Delacroix, Kaulbach, etc.), yet only Retzsch’s outlines pace the text, each scene illustrated by smallish double-framed copies mostly to Audot’s captions. If Muret’s details have much suffered, imaginable reformations observe scholastic notions of respectability: even Margaret’s complicated hair-do in plate 9 was subdued in Labatut’s edition (Fig. 6.19). This leads to censorship in two cases: outlines for the Prologue in Heaven and the Walpurgis Night have vanished to avoid tempting excitable young minds. Audot’s caption for plate 1, “Mephistopheles obtains permission from God to tempt Faust,” perhaps disturbed, the textbook serving in Catholic institutions.98 All scholastic things considered, it was aptly replaced by “Faust devotes himself by covenant to Mephistopheles” (pl. 4). Still, in the course of Labatut’s introduction, a reproduction of Julius Oldach’s Mephistopheles and the Student (1828) will have made a peculiar impression on youths poring over Goethe’s verses, more or less ardently studious of Germanity. Published at the onset of World War II, Labatut’s Faust would run to at least four editions (1940, 1947, 1951, 1959), and was still widely used in the 1960s and 70s, as prove French and German reference textbook bibliographies. Diminished and altered, Retzsch’s Faust art however made a lasting impression in France, particularly on the formative years of several generations.
Anonymous vignette of Margaret undoing her hair in “Abend” after Moritz Retzsch, in Goethe, Faust: Avec introduction, notes et commentaires par P. Labatut, third edition (Paris: Masson, 1951), 168–69
Courtesy HAAB, N 10700, Weimar
6.6 Retzsch’s Diffuse Influence
The last three examples (Baudry, Bry and Labatut for Masson et Cie) best map the fortune of Retzsch’s outlines in France. Due to new artistic trends holding the floor, these were otherwise sparsely used between the 1850s and the 1940s. The outline aesthetic was eclipsed by realism, impressionism, aestheticism, photography, even stereoscopic views, as by Charles Gaudin in 1868. Besides, Goethe’s Faust was no more the utter reference it had gradually become. From 1859, Gounod’s opera overtook it in France, totalling 500 performances in 1886, a thousand in 1894, and Gaudin’s stereoscopic images refer rather to Gounod than Goethe. Faustian melodramas still prevailed, and music vied for first place as well,99 although Hector Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust would not have come to light but for Goethe’s play.100 Nor are to be neglected earlier or fin-de-siècle parodies, giving an unexpected bearing to Retzsch’s and Goethe’s reception, even reading Faust itself, as Chapter 8 on Crowquill and Lachgern argues. If, by the nineteenth century’s dusk, Faust was “in decadence” as Jean de Palacio has claimed,101 Retzsch, however belittled, survived such fate.
True, evidence of dwindling interest in Retzsch is provided by Champfleury’s Les Vignettes romantiques (1883) in an early chapter reviewing German influence on French romantic art. Champfleury, keener to criticize Delacroix in a highly impressionistic way than explain Retzsch, treats the former artist as “possessed,” calling Devéria’s front cover for the Motte-Sautelet folio “the pencil’s Walpurgis.” Citing “Retsch” “a patient and cold worker,” after Faust “fascicles” (cahiers) he claims possessing, he reproduces a very poor imitation of plate 6 (Faust absorbed in the magic mirror, cf. Fig. 2.18), copied for the umpteenth time after Muret or Trueb with the peculiar caption Faust’s Laboratory. Both display and comment suggest he sourced material well out of context. Judging by the derivative and clichéd iconography likely passing through his hands, he concludes: “It should be noted that romanticism in Germany was classical, orderly, conservative, and not excessive, violent and demolishing as in France.”102
All things considered, might his pages reflect nevertheless a period stance? They rather signal Champfleury’s lack of care, indeed messy rule-of-thumb approximations. They also show to what extent copies underrated Retzsch’s work and marred his reception, while still spreading Faust’s fame abroad. Stereotypes were compelling to shape and outlines helped both aesthetically and practically. Champfleury’s book was influential in tackling vignettes and has been widely read by historians both of art and literature. His judgment of Retzsch (and Delacroix) has permeated. Conversely, in December 1851, the highly popular Magasin pittoresque, in a short note on Retzsch bearing portrait and facsimile signature, stressed that his drawings after Goethe and Shakespeare were “less translations than interpretations, and, so to speak, poetical comments,”103 all qualities lost on Champfleury. Pitting these contrasting views against each other bodes no fair conclusion either. Evidence may yet turn up. Contrast hardly encourages nuance, and such finesse is critical in fathoming Retzsch’s work and diverse readership. Still, a noticeable disparity in Retzsch’s French reception distinguishes first and second halves of the nineteenth century.
Retzsch’s Faust outlines left a recognizable trace on early and late romantic motifs. In 1847, Tony Johannot’s flimsy, sinuous, elongated devil, suddenly springing like jack-in-the-box betwixt Faust and Margaret in prison (Fig. 6.20), marks Retzsch’s influence, and was re-used.104 Even before Johannot, several Delacroix lithographs bear Retzsch’s influence in general composition or in detail, as well as Gaston Jourdain’s synthetic iconography that I further discuss in “Extensive vs. Intensive Iconography.”
Tony Johannot, Mephistopheles (after Moritz Retzsch) between Faust and Margaret in the prison scene, in Le Faust de Goethe: Traduction revue et complète, précédée d’un essai sur Goethe par M. Henri Blaze. Édition illustrée par M. Tony Johannot (Paris: Dutertre, 1847), insert engraving facing p. 192
BnF, Rés. M-Yh-2, Paris
A most arresting instance of Retzsch’s impact informs the “Goethe” section of Achille Devéria’s extensive visual registry. Eloquently described by Thierry Laugée as “an immense visual encyclopaedia classified by disciplinary fields, themes, historical period or geographic area,” it originally comprised 569 volumes of which less than 200 survive today.105 Tellingly, Devéria’s “Goethe” file relates only to Faust I. The material assembled dates from 1824 to the early 1850s, although the general compilation date is recorded as much later.106 Alaric Watts already mentions Devéria’s collection in an 1832 article: “His library contains no less than three hundred quarto volumes of prints, drawings, and tracings of costume, referring to all ages and countries, and to all ranks, from the prince to the peasant.”107 Devéria had invented an adroit binding system allowing him to easily insert or remove sheets as work progressed (used for the Bibliothèque nationale’s catalogue of Prints and Drawings of which he became a keeper). For “Goethe,” he starts with a gallery of Faust I iconography in nearly textual order. He extends by mounting images opposite a dismantled copy of Stapfer’s translation as issued 1828 by Motte and Sautelet (Motte was Devéria’s father-in-law). Between the two, as if to superimpose protagonist and author, he has lodged the Ciartes portrait of Faust with two Goethe portraits by Delacroix and Obrest Kiprinksi lithographed by H. Grevedon, and Seibertz’s final full-page vignette of a griffin-riding Goethe from the monumental Cotta Faust I (1852–54).108 The assortment combines items French (mainly sixteen Delacroix lithographs along with prints by Nicolas Maurin, Alexandre Colin, and Devéria himself), German (Ramberg’s 1828–29 Minerva engravings and random Seibertz material), and English (from Alaric Watts’s Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance). Rather than his original set, Retzsch copies prosper as lithographed by Muret (1824), re-engraved by W. Humphreys (or Humphrys) after John Massey Wright’s version (1825–26), or wood engraved by Rouget (1850), on whom all more in the next chapter. Mounted opposite corresponding Faust passages, they compare with other artists’, as in Margaret at Martha’s by Muret (after Retzsch’s pl. 12, cf. Fig. 10.6) juxtaposed with Ramberg’s rendition (Fig. 6.21).
Martha adorns Margaret with the jewels. Two images cut out and mounted by Achille Devéria opposite the corresponding Faust passage: (left) Muret’s lithographic copy after Moritz Retzsch and (right) Johann Heinrich Ramberg’s rendition of the scene engraved by J. Axmann (Minerva: Taschenbuch, 1828)
BnF Est., Tb-55 (C)-Pet. fol., Paris
Devéria’s compendium reveals that Retzsch’s copied and mediated iconography early did the rounds of French romantic circles. Delacroix was a close friend and fellow student of both Devéria brothers. Achille designed the spine, front and back covers of the 1828 folio Faust with Delacroix’s lithographs, as well as the poster advertising it. Hardly deriving from Retzsch, his sensational conceptions promote melodrama. Yet, in matching visual material encyclopedically, Devéria reveals covert relationships and courts Retzsch’s favour.
Another two instances epitomize how broadly Retzsch’s images spread in France from rebel fin-de-siècle aestheticism to middle- and lower middle-class bathos in the 1930s.
Notwithstanding Champfleury’s disparagement, detached plates still found their way into visual repertories. Lavishly produced 1900 by La Maison d’Art under directors François Jollivet-Castelot, Paul Ferniot and Paul Redonnel, a 206-page compilation on esoteric sciences, occultism and magic, Les Sciences maudites, printed on pink, white and blue paper, has two in-text vignettes and a half-page illustration after Retzsch. Unsurprisingly, the vignettes replicate Faust’s pledge, and Mephistopheles leading him to the witches’ revel, the illustration reproducing (an attenuated version of) the Sabbath itself.109 In November 1900, the first issue of Les Partisans. Revue de combat, d’art, de littérature et de sociologie, edited by Ferniot and Redonnel, predictably trumped the third image full-page to evoke Les Sciences maudites. The review was in fact advertising illustrated books by La Maison d’Art, a short-lived venture, which itself issued between 1900 and 1901 some twelve bibliophilic editions of anarchist propensity along with Les Partisans. Paul Redonnel (1860–1935), a poet and writer keen on Occitan culture, félibres, and alchemy, was involved in numerous art and literature magazines, occasionally as secretary of Léon Deschamps’s La Plume. He directed La Plume for a month and half after Deschamps’s demise on 28 December 1899, followed by little-known Paul Ferniot, editor for a sole 1 March 1900 issue (before the review was bought by Karl Boès) and would-be author of an ample illustrated volume on India (1900).110 Following setbacks with Boès, the duo had founded the short-lived Partisans. Fascination for the occult and rebellious attitudes ultimately blended with alchemic practice—Jollivet-Castelot was a Martinist and Rosicrucian, general secretary of the French Alchemic Association—in celebrating a few Retzsch compositions.
On the flip side, Librairie Gründ, art publisher of Bénézit’s dictionary from 1920, reissued Nerval’s revised translation of Faust in 1936, prefaced by his life-long friend Théophile Gautier. By 1938, idealistic or maudlin readers would be treated to one of several pictorial covers of a book for broad readership, an anonymous copy of Retzsch’s plate 14 with Faust leaning over Margaret and her daisy, noticeably after Édouard Frère’s already derivative and repurposed image (Fig. 6.22 to compare with Fig. 7.24a). In its message, the image obliterated all tragic tension or devilry (Mephistopheles and Martha are absent), cut a definite success with the public, and was regularly reissued within the “Bibliothèque précieuse” series from 1936 well into 1941 and World War II.
Unsigned cover for Goethe, Faust: Traduction de Gérard de Nerval (Paris: Librairie Gründ, 1938), republished within “La Bibliothèque précieuse” series. After Retzsch’s pl. 14 (garden scene) following Édouard Frère’s version
Author’s collection and file
6.7 Conclusion
This chapter starts by pinpointing Retzsch’s French reception in time (1824–30). The time band spans the first three editions by Auvray, Audot and Giard that launched Retzsch in France, yet his fortune there well exceeds any English-language counterpart. More varied than standardized octavos, popular with British, American or all- inclusive Anglophone readers, French and Belgian publishing ventures stud the nineteenth and overflow into the twentieth century with variety.
Thanks to variable scales in reproduction and a range of techniques, Retzsch’s outlines met with a comparatively broader Francophone readership, comprising print collectors and artists (Auvray), upper middle- to middle- class literati, men of letters, theatre enthusiasts, stage directors (Audot), and the progressive aristocracy keen on engraving and lithography (Laborde, Bichebois and alii’s experiments). It embraced the German community in France (Baudry), and spread to the United States (Kuno Meyer, Wyeth). French items spawned counterfeit Belgian editions and allow us to nuance set ideas about contrefaçons belges. They appealed to the general reader and the masses thanks to Frère’s and Rouget’s variants for the dime brochures of the time (J. Bry aîné). Retzsch marked romantic iconography (Johannot and Delacroix), interested fin-de-siècle aesthetes and younger writers (Les Partisans), appealed to middle-class readers in the 1930s (Gründ), and became accessible to lycée pupils and undergraduates in the 1940s (Labatut for Masson). Last, but not least, his icons served to drill draughtsmen in copying exercises.
Without France equalling the striking variety of prints and books of Retzsch’s British vogue, the first French lithographed and engraved copies, often re-used, establish his public awareness. The interest of Auvray and Audot editions lies in their early transformation of the engraved set into a captioned picture story (Bildergeschicht). Both revived, via more recent means of reproduction (lithography, engraving), the long-standing dialogue of the Faust myth with brochures and Bilderbogen, which brought together several small captioned scenes on the same Épinal-like sheet.111 Scarce awareness of Retzsch in France, and his near invisibility in specialist literature, stem from translation-based scholarship that mask the purport and weight of non-textual printed culture. Indeed, Retzsch’s prints either followed on translations (Muret), escorted or supplemented them (Auvray and Audot’s relation with Nerval), or rivalled the Motte-Sautelet folio. I have flagged up diverse points also to show the medallion’s reverse side.
Last, but not least, behind Nerval’s translation that hallmarks this chapter lies a French fascination with Faust as mythical inventor of printing. Théaulon’s Faust is a printer, and the anonymous legend attributed to Widmann by Nerval celebrates printing. The unsigned preface to the Giard edition I attribute to Louis de Laborde expands on Faust as its inventor. Several period reviews refer to the same myth. The variety of editions that welcomed Retzsch form a vista of printing cases illustrative of the French fusion of Fust, Gutenberg’s companion, with Goethe’s Faust in print culture. Both the frontispiece and the cover of Nerval’s 1828 translation deserve then a few remarks as they reflect such speculative concerns.
Pinéas’s print, facing the title-page of Nerval’s translation, has two foci: the demon’s malignity and the doctor’s library (cf. Fig. 6.4). Pinéas reworked Muret’s matching plate. The devil leans over Faust, in a different poise, glaring avidly at the covenant, his triangular face exaggerated. A fierce expression runs over his animal-like features. His long claw-like fingers are ready to clutch. The bookshelves are filled with precious tomes, row after row of ornate spines, a motif echoing the cover’s composition signalling a choice book. On orange paper, an elongated ivy-clad hexagon frames the title in Gothic type, the subtitle in small caps, a motto signed Germaine de Staël, and the publisher’s imprint (cf. Fig. 6.7a). Ivy symbolising printing, the publisher re-emerges as printer with his address along the two lower sides. The hedera, a small sign of theoretically no particular meaning in the shape of an ivy leaf, was mainly used in Latin epigraphy to separate words or fill an empty space or a short line. Manuscript copyists used it, then printers re-appropriated it. As printer’s ornament, assimilated to the fleuron, it often adorns elegant nineteenth-century printed books such as Dondey-Dupré’s. Its sophisticated cover, echoed by the doctor’s impressive library, mirrors the end of Nerval’s preface on Faust as inventor of printing. The devil’s irony, Nerval had specified, echoing Mme de Staël, “judges the universe as a bad book with the devil as censor” (his emphasis). Several of the French editions discussed in this chapter toyed with just such an idea.
Correspondance générale d’Eugène Delacroix, ed. A. Joubin (Paris: Plon, 1938), 4:303.
Guinevere Doy, “Delacroix et Faust,” Nouvelles de l’estampe, no. 21 (May–June 1975): 18–23; Delacroix, Journal, 1:120, n. 54.
Agnes Mongan, David to Corot, ed. M. Stewart (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1996), 128.
Gazette de France, no. 7 (7 Jan 1824): 4.
“Beaux-Arts. Faust,” La Pandore, no. 244 (15 Mar 1824): 5a.
H., “Faust,” Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle 10 (1825): 244.
Amédée Pichot, Voyage historique et littéraire en Angleterre et en Écosse (Paris: Ladvocat et Charles Gosselin, 1825), 1:393.
Literary Gazette, no. 435 (21 May 1825): 329c, author’s emphasis.
See for instance, Alberto Milano, “Change of Use, Change of Public, Change of Meaning: Printed Images Travelling through Europe,” in Reading Books and Prints as Cultural Objects, ed. E. Stead, 137–56.
Clapham, The Economic Development of France and Germany 1815–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 53f, 121.
Todd, Free Trade and its Enemies in France, 1814–1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Journal des débats (7 May 1830): 3.
Giles Barber, “Treuttel and Würtz: Some Aspects of the Importation of Books from France, c. 1825,” Library, 5th s., 23, no. 2 (June 1968): 118–44; Jefcoate, Ocean of Literature, 70–74.
See in bibliography Barbier 1987 (PhD); Barbier 1995 (enlarged published version); Barbier, Jurratic and Varry, eds., 1996; Barbier, ed., 2005; Barbier and Monok, eds., 2008; Michon and Mollier, eds., 2000; Mollier, 2005; Cooper-Richet, Mollier, and Silem, eds., 2005.
Jeanblanc, Des Allemands dans l’industrie et le commerce du livre à Paris (1811–1870) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1994).
Tim Clayton and Sheila O’Connell, Bonaparte and the British: Prints and Propaganda in the Age of Napoleon (London: British Museum Press, 2015).
Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
Antony Griffiths and Frances Carey, German Printmaking in the Age of Goethe (London: British Museum Press, 1994); Griffiths, The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking, 1550–1820 (London: The British Museum, 2016). On copying, 114–31.
Atkins, “Fragmentary English Translations,” 28. Based on Engel, no. 1809, and Neubert, 241b.
Martha Langkavel, Die französischen Übertragungen von Goethes “Faust” (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1902); Karl Heinz Kube, Goethes Faust in französischer Auffassung und Bühnendarstellung (Berlin: E. Ebering, 1932); Lea Marquart, Goethes Faust in Frankreich: Studien zur dramatischen Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009).
L’Intermédiaire des chercheurs et des curieux 37, no. 788 (10 Feb 1898), 166; no. 796 (30 Apr 1898), 624–25; no. 799 (30 May 1898), 760.
Albert Stapfer, “Préface,” in Goethe, Faust, trans. A. Stapfer (Paris: Ch. Motte et Sautelet, 1828), I.
Le Men, La Cathédrale illustrée de Hugo à Monet (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998), 39.
A.-J. Pons, “Notice artistique,” in Goethe, Faust, trans. Blaze de Bury (Paris: A. Quantin, 1880), 264–66.
Marquart, Goethes Faust in Frankreich, 404.
Beinecke: Speck Ck99 R3 +840 copy 2. See further Appendix I, no. 6.
Beinecke: Speck Ck99 R3 +840 copy 1, half-bound, devoid of title-page and covers, plates foxed. Some of the plates show vestiges of having been mounted (exhibited?) at top or bottom.
Press reviews in chronological order: La Gazette de France (7 Jan 1824); Le Constitutionnel (8 Jan 1824); La Gazette de France (12 Mar 1824); La Pandore (15 Mar 1824); Le Corsaire (19 Mar 1824).
H., “Faust,” 242.
“Beaux-Arts. Faust,” 5.
Robert Vilain, “Faust and France: Stapfer’s Translation, Delacroix’s Lithographs, Goethe’s Responses,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 81, no. 2 (June 2012): 75–76.
Pierre-Louis Duchartre and René Saulnier, L’Imagerie parisienne. (L’Imagerie de la rue Saint-Jacques) (Paris: Gründ, [1944]), 191.
Probably intended are Henri-Gérard Fontallard, Horace Vernet, and Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet.
H., “Faust,” 245, author’s emphasis.
Faust, tragédie de Goëthe: nouvelle traduction complète, en prose et en vers, par Gérard (Paris: Dondey-Dupré, 1828), V–VI.
Claude Pichois, Philarète Chasles et la vie littéraire au temps du romantisme (Paris: J. Corti, 1965), 1:264.
Ginette Picat-Guinoiseau, Une œuvre méconnue de Charles Nodier: “Faust,” imité de Goethe (Paris: Didier, 1977), 52–54.
Emmanuel Reibel, Faust: La musique au défi du mythe (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 112–13.
Pinéas, Dessin linéaire, ornement: Exercices gradués de dessin linéaire et de dessin d’ornement. 1ère série (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1848).
Jean Malaplate, “La traduction de Faust par Gérard de Nerval, vérité et légende,” Cahiers Gérard de Nerval, no. 13 (1990): 9–17; nuanced in Stephen Butler, The Fausts of Gérard de Nerval: Intertextuality, Translation, Adaptation (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018), 23–26, 81–82, 166–69, 186–88.
Charles Dédéyan, “Vocation faustienne de Gérard de Nerval,” La Revue des lettres modernes, no. 25–26 (1er trimester 1957): 52–53; Gautier, “Gérard de Nerval,” in Portraits et souvenirs littéraires (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1875), 12.
Helmut Spiess, Goethe, Eckermann und “Faust auf der Bühne” (Dingelstädt: Josef Heinevetter, 1933), 95n. More on this in Chapter 9.
Picat-Guinoiseau, Une œuvre méconnue, 54 (adjusted).
BnF Musique: RES-1443. Auguste Vincent’s exemplar of 3rd Audot ed.; French-German captions and large paper plates.
F., “Faust et Hamlet,” Journal des artistes et des amateurs, 2nd ser., 2, no. 23 (7 Dec 1828): 354.
Catherine Join-Diéterle, Les Décors de scène de l’Opéra de Paris à l’époque romantique (Paris: Picard, 1988), nos. 94, 96–97, 99.
L’Écho de Paris (29 and 30 Oct 1828): 1, 4.
Pasted on lilac backing sheets, the re-engraved prints with French captions form part of the Theatersammlung, Universität Köln, n.d.
F., “Faust et Hamlet,” 354.
Voïart, “Avertissement,” in Fridolin: 8 dessins de Retzsch (Paris: Audot, 1829), 6–7.
Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 5. 1835–1838, ed. M. M. Sealts, Jr (Cambridge, Ma.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 298. Journal C, between 16 and 20 Apr 1837.
F., “Faust et Hamlet,” 353–54.
Rosenkranz, Zur Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Königsberg: Gebrüder Bornträger, 1836), 260–61.
Charles Dédéyan, Gérard de Nerval et l’Allemagne (Paris: Société d’Édition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1957), 1:20.
BnF: Q-10B-1834, Q-10B-1818–1900 (publishers’ catalogues).
M.-A. Deflandre, Répertoire du commerce de Paris (Paris: Au Bureau du Répertoire du Commerce de Paris, 1829), 2:471.
Journal des débats (7 May 1830): 3; La Semaine 3 (23 May 1830): 3.
André Jammes and Françoise Courbage, eds., Les Didot: Trois siècles de typographie et de bibliophilie, 1698–1998 (Paris: [Agence culturelle de Paris], 1998), 29, 53.
Gazette littéraire 2, no. 18 (31 Mar 1831): 276–79.
http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/imprimeurs/node/21884, digitized cover; digitized version of the volume https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10485756.
Dictionnaire des imprimeurs-lithographes du XIXe siècle, s.v. “Bichebois, Louis, Pierre, Alphonse” (by Élisabeth Parinet), <http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/imprimeurs/node/21884> (7 Sept 2018).
Digitised at my request https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/16712419.
Dictionnaire des imprimeurs-lithographes du XIXe siècle, s.v. “Frey, Jean George” (by Élisabeth Parinet) <http://elec.enc.sorbonne.fr/imprimeurs/node/22337> (16 Apr 2019).
Bertrand de Villeneuve-Bargemon, Alexandre de Laborde ([Neuilly-sur-Seine]: IBAcom, 2011), 129; Christian Augé and Pascale Linant de Bellefonds, “Présentation,” in Alexandre de Laborde and L.-M.-A. Linant de Bellefonds, Pétra retrouvée (Paris: Pygmalion / Gérard Watelet, 1994), 9–13; DCHA, s.v. “Laborde, Léon-Emmanuel-Simon-Joseph (vicomte, comte, puis marquis de)” (by Geneviève Bresc-Bautier), online (last accessed 5 Mar 2023).
Catalogue des livres composant la bibliothèque de feu M. L. J. S. E., Marquis de Laborde (Paris: Adolphe Labitte, 1871–72), 2:no. 3464, 1:no. 643 respectively.
Beinecke: Speck Ck99 R3 +828 (Cornwall); BnF Musique: RES-1443 (Vincent); BHVP: 8-APO-1566 (RES) (Apollinaire); BnF ASP: P16-EGC-368 (Craig).
Odile Krakovitch, Les Imprimeurs parisiens sous Napoléon Ier (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2008); Marie-Claire Boscq, Imprimeurs et libraires parisiens sous surveillance (1814–1848) (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018), 19–24.
Jan van der Marck, Romantische Boekillustratie in België (Roermond: J. J. Romen & Zonen, 1956), 269.
[Charles Hen], La Réimpression: Étude sur cette question considérée principalement au point de vue des intérêts belges et français (Bruxelles: Auguste Decq, 1851); Herman Dopp, La Contrefaçon des livres français en Belgique, 1815–1852 (Louvain: Librairie Universitaire, 1932).
François Godfroid, Aspects inconnus et méconnus de la contrefaçon en Belgique (Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Françaises, 1998), 693.
Marck, Romantische Boekillustratie, 273–74.
Dopp, La Contrefaçon, 27.
Jacques Grandjonc, Communisme/Kommunismus/Communism: Origine et développement international de la terminologie communautaire prémarxiste des utopistes aux néo-babouvistes (Trier: Schriften aus dem Karl Marx Haus, 1989), 1:125.
Revue bibliographique des Pays-Bas et de l’étranger 7, no. 37 (17 Oct 1828): 435; no. 41 (11 Dec 1828): 491–92.
HAAB: G 349 (French captions) and HAAB: F 3858 (bilingual captions). Both, named “nouvelle édition,” are dated 1828.
Vilain, “Faust and France,” 113.
On D. Vincent and the Williaume brothers, see Marie-Christine Claes, Répertoire des lithographes actifs en Belgique sous la période hollandaise et le règne de Léopold Ier (1816–1865), 3rd ed. (IRPA, 2022), 503–04 and 512–20, http://balat.kikirpa.be/lithographes/claes_lithographes.pdf (last accessed 8 Mar 2022).
Vilain, “Faust and France,” 113–15.
Lambert, “L’illustration dans les contrefaçons belges: Une approche systémique,” Image [&] Narrative, no. 7 (Oct 2003), http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/graphicnovel/marijlambert.htm.
René Fayt, “Les contrefacteurs belges étaient des ‘étrangers’,” Cahiers du Cédic, no. 2–4 (Jan 2003): 165–70.
Dopp, La Contrefaçon, 40, 79; Marck, Romantische Boekillustratie, 33.
Appendix I, no. 22.
Digitized by Google, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hwk7uh&view=1up&seq=15.
Victor Lange, “The Kretzschmar von Kienbusch Germanic Collection,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1957): 56.
Catalogue de livres modernes […] composant la bibliothèque de feu M. le docteur Abel Giraudeau (Paris: Librairie Techener, 1898), 2nd pt., 133:no. 612.
Jeanblanc, Des Allemands, 9.
Engel, no. 726.
At Stassin and Xavier’s at Rue du Coq (previously Baudry’s own premises); Amyot’s at Rue de la Paix near the Palais-Royal; Truchy’s on Boulevard des Italiens; Théophile Barrois’s on Quai Voltaire, “and in all good bookshops in France and abroad.”
Beinecke: Speck Rb41 843b copy 1.
Beinecke: Speck Rb41 843b copy 2.
Georges-André Vuaroqueaux, “L’édition populaire au milieu du XIXe siècle: L’exemple de la famille Bry,” (Master diss., Université Paris X-Nanterre, 1989), 162–68.
Nerval, Œuvres complètes, ed. J. Guillaume and Cl. Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 1:1694–99, 1930–31 (by Lieven D’Hulst).
Vuaroqueaux, 185–91, and his Appendix I.
Flor O’Squarr, “Édouard Frère,” Galerie contemporaine, artistique, littéraire 1, 2nd ser. (Paris: Ludovic Baschet, 1876), 1; Daniel Baduel, Aude Bertrand, and Christian Dauchel, L’École d’Écouen: Une colonie de peintres au XIXe siècle (Écouen: Office de Tourisme d’Écouen, 2012), 147–48; 2nd enlarged ed., 2018, 14–15.
Fernand Baldensperger, Bibliographie critique de Goethe en France (Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1907), no. 774; Faust-Bibliographie, ed. H. Henning, no. 1097.
Arsenal: EST-Pet. fol.-I (1).
Exemplar given by P. Labatut to “Father Salvat (i.e., Joseph Salvat, chair of Occitan language and literature), professor at the Catholic Institute, in highly respectful homage” on 9 Jan 1946. Book withdrawn from the Institut catholique de Toulouse (ICT) library.
Reibel, Faust: La musique, 10–11.
Claude Paul, Les Métamorphoses du diable: Méphistophélès dans les œuvres faustiennes de Goethe, Lenau, Delacroix et Berlioz (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015), 9, 164–69.
Palacio, “Décadence de Faust,” in Mythes de la décadence, ed. A. Montandon (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2001), 37–46.
Champfleury, Les Vignettes romantiques (Paris: E. Dentu, 1883), 54–56.
“Moritz Retzsch,” Le Magasin pittoresque 19, no. 49 (Dec 1851): 389b.
By Michel Lévy Frères in 1868; four of the engravings also entered a cost-effective translation into Spanish, decked with varied plates, including German ones (Barcelona: Olivares, 1876).
Thierry Laugée, “Achille Devéria et son herbier de femmes,” in L’Invention du geste amoureux: Anthropologie de la séduction dans les arts visuels de l’Antiquité à nos jours, ed. V. Boudier, G. Careri and E. M. Kelif (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2019), 92.
Between 1853 and 1870. The collection entered the BnF Prints department in 1858, of which Devéria had become adjunct curator in 1848 (Laugée, 91–92).
Alaric A. Watts, “The Deveria Family,” Literary Souvenir (1832): 326.
On the latter (and the griffin), see Stead, “Les deux Faust I d’Engelbert Seibertz.”
Jollivet-Castelot, Les Sciences maudites (Paris: Édition de la Maison d’Art, 1900), 25, 26, 27.
Philipp Leu, “Les revues littéraires et artistiques, 1890–1900. Questions de patrimonialisation et de numérisation” (PhD diss., Université Paris-Saclay, 2016), 1:71, 109.
Neubert, 32–37, 80.