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Les hortensias bleus

1896140 x 190 mm

FIRST EDITION
ONE OF 15 EX. ON HOLLAND
only large paper edition

2 900 

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Description

FIRST EDITION.
ONE OF 15 NUMBERED COPIES ON HOLLANDE PAPER
, only large paper.

Announced by the press, which gave extracts, the volume was published on 29 May 1896 with a dedication "to  D. G. D. Y. [Don Gabriel de Yturri] In testimony and memory of a rare and indissoluble pact for beauty and for good."
Containing around four thousand lines and pieces of between four and four hundred lines, it is divided into five parts - Introït, Chapelle Blanche, Chambre claire, Chambre obscure, Ite.

Lucien Daudet and Marcel Proust spent the day of 28 May reading the book given to them by Montesquiou:
"I have just finished Blue Hydrangeas, and after leafing through part of it aloud with Marcel Proust, I continued and finished my reading with the contemplation that your verses inspire in me. [...]. But what I wanted to express to you is all the mysterious and beneficial leaven that they contain for me and for understanding and well-born minds, leaven of acute beauty and melancholy and grandiose glimpses of life, by which grace seems to us more supple and beautiful, ugliness more ridiculous and genius more precious.x"

However, the work divided the critics, and nearly sixty articles appeared, some of them particularly acerbic, such as those by Jean Lorrain, Viélé-Griffin and Gustave Kahn, while others were full of praise, such as Robin, for whom "the harmony of a stanza  […] embraces the heart".  Flament placed the collection in the rich context of 1896, when the definitive edition was published in 1907: "These blue hydrangeas [...] are a monument to a time, they have the character of their era, they reflect the days of aestheticism, decay and excessive refinement of thought and manners, which were experienced in Paris, and even in the provinces, from 1889 to 1896.
In all the production of the time, this particular production, whose great masters were Verlaine and Mallarmé and brilliant followers like André Gide, foreign satellites like Oscar Wilde and restless, ardent disciples of great talent, violence and harshness, like Jean Lorrain, the poems of Count Robert de Montesquiou will remain as one of the most brilliant facets of a very unique literary diamond". (Modes, no 74, February 1907,)

Like The Bats, Hydrangeas will be associated with Montesquiou, whose new nickname, Hortensiou, can be heard in the salons. This fashion affected illustrators such as Lucien Métivet and Caran d'Ache, who depicted the author or some of his friends dressed in hydrangea. "La Gandara was soon to paint a portrait of Anna de Noailles with this flower, an emblem of Robert's protection of the poetess". and "Not even a horse christened Hortensia, at whose races Yturri rushes to Maisons-Laffitte to announce his victories to the Count". 

A rarity. 

Antoine Bertrand, Robert de Montesquiou,  Garnier, 2021.

 

Paris,Carpenter,1896.In-8, Softcover140 x 190 mm,418 pp.

Filled cover, uncut, cover washed.

Bio

Robert de Montesquiou

(Paris: 19 March 1855 - Menton: 11 December 1921)

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