New Addition: Aloysius Bertrand, 'Gaspard de la nuit'

Aloysius Bertrand, Gaspard de la nuit (Treasurer of Night or Caspar/Magus of the night or Night Rat). 1957. No. 483 of Edition of 12,000 copies. Le Club français du Livre: Paris. 237 pp.

Aloysius [Louis] Bertrand was one of the most experimental writers of the first-generation avant-garde, and was frequently cited as a precursor by Baudelaire, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. Bertrand is often credited as the (paradoxically) unacknowledged inventor of the prose-poem; in fact discussions and experiments regarding the form had been going on since the late 18th Century, but in this book Bertrand systematically developed it to its full potential, and in his Preface to Paris Spleen Baudelaire states that Gaspar de la nuit was the inspiration and guiding model of his own collection of prose poems. Bertrand's work, like Nerval's, often seems to envelop a second discourse within it regarding his activity with occult, alchemical, and mystical research and practice. 

 

Bertrand's collection was set for publication in 1836, but stalled for years, due probably to lack of funding. During the entire course of its composition he was slowly dying of tuberculosis, and when the book finally appeared, it was a year after his death in a Paris pauper's hospital in which he had taken refuge without informing his friends; only by chance did the Romanticist sculptor David d'Angers stumble upon him there a few weeks before his death. The book finally appeared, in a very small run, the following year. It was reprinted intermittently over the course of the following century, but always by small underground presses in very small editions. By the time this edition was published, Bertrand's work was finally becoming available in France.

 

Like many Frenetic Romantics, Bertrand was deeply involved with philology and linguistics, as reflected in the title; 'Gaspard' is an extremely rare and archaic word with several possible meanings, ranging from the name of one of the Three Magi to slang for 'rat'.