Description

ORIGINAL FRENCH EDITIONtranslated "freely"andalmost from memory"by Charles Nodier and Isidore Taylor.

It was in 1813 that the Irish vicar Charles Maturin, future author of Melmoth the Wandererwrote this gothic tragedy. The play was rejected in Dublin but, thanks to the support of Walter Scott and Byron, was premiered in 1816 at the Drury-Lane theatre in London.
Nodier and Taylor were enthusiastic about Bertramwhich they consider "horribly beautiful"However, in their preface to the translation, they do not fail to express a certain ambivalence towards Romanticism: "The often ridiculous and sometimes revolting genre known in France as romantic, and for which we believe we have not too unfortunately found the epithet frenetic, will never be a genre, because all you have to do is get out of every genre to be classified in this one. [...] However, the state of our society makes it easy to understand the welcome it gives to sentimental follies and passionate exaggerations. Aged people need to be stimulated by violent novelties. Paralysis needs electric shocks, sensibility needs poetic horrors, and the rabble needs executions.." Notwithstanding these reservations, their adaptation of Bertram would mark the development of French Romanticism. Marcel Ruff believes: "Only Bertram and Melmoth can be considered to have fertilised the imagination and thought of our Romantics." ("Maturin & the French Romantics"preface to the edition of Bertram given by Corti in 1956)

AUTOGRAPH SIGNED LETTER FROM THE TRANSLATOR TO ALFRED DE VIGNY :
"To my friend Count Alfred de Vigny
Br Taylor"

The two authors met in the Red Companies, where Vigny was appointed second lieutenant at the age of 17. In 1821, when Taylor gave his translation of BertramVigny had just published his first works - a play in verse and an essay on the poetry of Byron - and was working on adapting the dramatic works of Shakespeare and Ariosto; he would later frequent Charles Nodier's "Cénacle" at the Arsenal library, a major centre of Romanticism in France.
SUPERB ROMANTIC PROVENANCE.

The work is enhanced by a portrait of Baron Taylor engraved by Trichon, pasted to the verso of the last white leaf, and a photographic portrait of Baron Taylor (albumen print) pasted to the first white endpaper.

Armorial bookplate pasted on the upper flyleaf: Louis-Antoine Tenant de la Tour (1808-1882), tutor to the Duc de Montpensier, poet and translator; he was the son of Jean-Baptiste Tenant de la Tour, Louis-Philippe's librarian at the Palais de Compiègne.