LAMARTINE Alphonse de (1790-1869)

Lot 159
Go to lot
Estimation :
8000 - 10000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 22 406EUR
LAMARTINE Alphonse de (1790-1869)
AUTHORIZED MANUSCRIPTS for the Journey to the East and for the New Journey to the East (1851), and FILE of letters and documents about this journey (1850). An important set of manuscripts on his travels in the Orient, and letters and documents concerning his second journey and his estate in Burghaz-Owa near Smyrna. After his long journey to the Orient from 1832-1833, Lamartine published his Voyage en Orient in 1835, which was a great success. After his political setbacks, and in financial disarray, Lamartine, who had defended Turkey well in the question of the East, obtained from Sultan Abdul Medjid the donation of large plots of land in Burghaz-Owa, near Smyrna (Izmir). Having sent his friend from Mâcon, Charles Rolland, to take possession of it, he decided to go to his lands during a second trip to Turkey, from 21 June to 6 August 1850. After unfortunate attempts at exploitation and a lack of capital, Lamartine returned Burghaz-Owa to the Sultan, in exchange for an annuity. The New Journey to the East appeared in issues of Lamartine's review Les Foyers du Peuple in 1851, and in 2 volumes by Wittersheim in 1852. ManUScriTS. Unpublished leaflet of the Journey to the East, paginated 7, relating to the part on Jerusalem (on 1 large page in-fol.., tears and repairs): "A certain number of shrines built in the traditional footsteps of the life and death of Christ, is the object of worship and polemic of all Christian communions" . Preface to the Journey to the East. Autograph manuscript (7 pages and a quarter in-4 on paper with its crowned figure), [1849], published as an "Epilogue" in the re-editions of the first Voyage en Orient. "We have completed this voyage by various notes, additions and unpublished translations of such a nature as to increase its interest. Fathalla Saiguir's account of this first Arab traveller among the Waabite tribes of the desert was completed by him and brought to Paris. ...] There is something superior to the antipathies of races, memories, religions, it is the sympathy of civilization which tends to realize more and more the great unity of the human race under the simbole of Light and freedom." Note added to Journey of the East. Autograph manuscript (10 pages in-4 on paper with its crowned figure), published as "Note postscriptum" (dated December 1, 1849) in the re-editions of the first Voyage en Orient. "The memory of primitive peoples is as unalterable as the sky of the East. They keep longtem the trace of the travellers who lived among their tribes. They make an event of a passing man, a traditional poem of the story of the days he lived in their tents. In a country where changes of government are rare, where changes of morals are unknown, where tribunes and newspapers do not exist, where everything is uniform, silent and monotonous in the existence of peoples, it takes little to occupy longtem the public mind. The East, too, is the land of imagination, the land of the marvellous" . Copy prepared for a late re-edition of the Journey to the East, paginated 298 to 322, composed of 12 ff. prints torn from one edition and 8 ff. in-4 with additions, autographs (of a defeated writing) on the first 2 ff., then from the hand of his niece Valentine de Cessiat. Autograph manuscript for the Nouveau Voyage en Orient (40 pages in-4 with erasures and corrections, small holes in the bundle). Lamartine recounts his arrival in Tyra on July 8, 1850 and his stay there: "After passing through the gate, we found ourselves in a wide and clean street that sloped very gently towards the centre of the city. It was lined with elegant one- and two-storey houses, gardens and cafés of a very rich appearance" . (chap. LxxV to xcix of the Foyers du peuple edition; p. 150-165 of the Calmann-Lévy edition, 1877). A long religious meditation, in the "night of the ramazan" (pp. 17-22 of the manuscript) has been removed from the edition: "Wonderful effect of a powerful act of reason and faith in the soul of a great man! Thought of Mohammed of a poor camel driver in the desert who, after having illuminated his thought in his forehead less wide than the space contained between the outstretched thumb and little finger of a child, today illuminated three continents and the spaces inhabited by hundreds of millions of men! The glow of these minarets had dissipated before her the darkness and the ghosts of fetishism and idolatry in which these spaces and souls were rotting before the Hegyre, and this glow no doubt had been reflected on the forehead of Muhammad first by reason and then by Christianity ! Manuscript of the diary of a travelling companion of the Lamartines (the Baron de Chamborant, or Victor de Champeaux?), chapter xxxVii-xLix (13 p. petit in-4 very full of tight writing), from the departure from Livorno on the Orontes (June 25, 1850)
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue