Note by Joseph Bouchardy – Being Magnetised Makes him Sick!

Joseph Bouchardy, Romanticist Playwright. Letter to [ADDRESSEE???] Letter on the effects of a medical magnetism session, and visiting a play. Undated, c. 1850, Friday, 6:30. 
   

Joseph Bouchardy was apprenticed as an engraver, a career which at the time entailed workshop apprenticeship rather than formal schooling, and spent much of his childhood apprenticed to a printer in England. Among the most radical partisans of underground Romanticism as it emerged in the late 1820s, he co-founded the seminal Jeunes-France/Bouzingo group and soon gravitated away from art and toward playwrighting, in an elevated archaic style which also sometimes veered away from "correct" written French to reflect the street-speech of his roots. By the 1850s he was one of the most popular playwrights in France, and his intricately-plotted, neo-Gothic melodramas tinged with social commentary were flocked to by the semi-literate working class. 

   

This note, written to be run to the recipient by courrier, was probably written to the playwright and singer Félix Duterte de Véteuil, an exact contemporary of Bouchardy. The playwright is cancelling an engagement due to nausea following a session of pseudo-scientific experimentation. The border-regions of the occult and experimental (often bogus) science were thriving, and a number of Bouchardy's friends and acquaintances in the cultural underground were involved to varying degrees with the overlapping practices of phrenology, mersmerism, and magnetism – the use of magnets and magnetic "rays" to supposedly re-align the body's internal equilibrium. Clearly, one or more of his friends had prevailed upon him to try it, with the results described here.

  

Corrections, variant readings, and guesses at the portions I've been unable to transcribe are welcome; I make no claims to mastery of reading nineteenth-century cursive lettering in my second language.....

The archive also includes two other letters written by Bouchardy.

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French transcription:

Vendredi 6 heures 1/2

Mon cher Bon

pour avoir eu aujourd’hui la curiosité et l’Imprudence de me faire magnetiser je suis devenu coupable de vomissements, et enfin d’un mal de bète qui m’ôte toutes facultés . . . je vais me trainer dans une Comédie quelconque pour voir si etant [epè?] je souffrirai moins que de bout, et s’il en [eu] [au??itremiens], je prendrai le porte de me coucher.
    Je sais que tu [ferais] [apez] [bon] pour n’attendre a la nuit, Je [t’eu] pries [fois] [urevence], et [pardonnes] la grande migraine a [toa]
                    Viel ami
                     J. Bouchardy


Addresse:
 [Frepé]         Monsieur
Duterte        [Flaunue de Lettres]
15 [(Bis)] Boulevard de [Martry]

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English translation:
 
Address:
[????]    Mr.
Duterte*    [Stroller through Letters]
15 [(second)] Boulevard

My dear man

for having today had the curiosity and foolhardiness to go get myself magnetized I’ve been rendered guilty of vomiting, and eventually a beast’s sickness which withdraws all the faculties . . .     I’m going to drag myself out into some Comedy or other to see whether by [being active?] I’ll suffer less than on my feet, and if [it'd had?] [??????], I’ll be out the door to lie back down.
    I know that you’d [make/do] [harsh] [good] not to attend tonight, I beg you [time] [?????], and [forgive] this massive migraine [has/to/etc.] [???]
                    Old friend,
                J. Bouchardy