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the book collector Other such series enjoyed great popularity in the mid-19th century, and these popular prints often became source material for later artists. Manet, whose modern, penetrating eye never failed to see things as they were, did not hesitate to choose his subjects from everyday life, including prostitutes; he must certainly have seen the chromolithographs of the 1850s before creating his notorious Olympia in 1863. Its scandalous subject matter – a confident courtesan wearing only a neck ribbon, earrings, a gold bracelet, some dainty slippers and a flower in her hair – echoes the chromolithographs from the 1850s, but instead of calling his subject by a street name, Manet chose ‘Olympia,’ a name associated with prostitutes, and one that was in Parent’s original list. Having learned so much about Parent and his influence, I was still in the dark about the anonymous author of my dictionary, the anonymous homme de bien, until a short while ago. Thanks to persistence, luck and the Internet, which did not exist when I acquired the book, I identified him, and the circumstances surrounding the dictionary’s publication—and destruction. I had already been able to find the book listed by title in several bibliographies of French books, and that the Bibliothèque Nationale apparently had the only institutional copy extant, leading me to believe that the book was very rare, and to assume that the edition size had been small. But why would someone go to the trouble of compiling such a dictionary and print very few copies considering that the demand for such a book would have been enormous.21 Information on edition sizes prior to the late 19th century is difficult to find, and especially so for such an obscure book as the Dictionnaire—or so I thought. From time to time, I would check the Internet to see if any new information had surfaced, and during a recent search, I found it cited in two obscure reference books that I did not know and had never seen before: Fernand Drujon’s Catalogue des ouvrages écrits et dessins de toute nature poursuivis, supprimés ou condamnés (1879) and Antoine Laporte’s Bibliographie contemporaine: Historie litteraire du dix-neuvième siècle (1887). Each citation had more information than was included in the standard bibliographies, which repetitively included 21. In contrast, Parent’s book, even the first edition of 1836, is readily available on several online rare book sites. 60
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pavement nymphs and roadside flowers only the title, publisher and date. In these newly discovered reference works, I at last found the author’s name: Charles Lepage. After a bit more searching, I learned that he was a poet, singer, writer, journalist and inventor who was born in 1803 and died in 1868, making the dictionary a work of his youth. What astonished me was the short note in both entries indicating that the dictionary had been destroyed by the authorities with the consent of the author as per a court judgement of 15 December, 1826, making the book ‘very rare if not very interesting’ according to Laporte. This was shocking news in itself, but Drujon included one small parenthetical word, Moniteur. Armed with this lead, I discovered that he was citing Le Moniteur Universel, a long-running daily Parisian newspaper. Now all I had to do was find the actual article. Thanks to the Bibliothèque Nationale’s online services, I did. In a triumph of French bibliophily, every issue from 1790 to 1901 is available online, and knowing that the article must have appeared on December 15 or soon thereafter, I read through those of December 15th and 16th with no luck, but found it in the December 17th issue under the headline The case of the Dictionnaire anecdotique des Nymphes du Palais-Royal was settled yesterday.22 I had tracked it down! This is the sort of discovery that makes a biblio-sleuth ecstatic, and I was. The article reported that the case against the author had been settled; that Lepage still had 600 to 700 copies of the little book; that the court had found the book to be shameful but not illegal; and that the author had agreed to destroy his remaining copies. This led me to believe that the original edition size had been perhaps 750 or 1000 copies, and that after the destruction of Lepage’s remaining copies, only a handful had survived, including mine. I soon discovered more about the book’s legal history, finding the transcript of the trial online in an issue of the Gazette des Tribunaux, December 9, 1826.23 Lepage was not the only defendant. The 22. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k4424522v.item 23. The Gazette des Tribunaux, a daily for most of its existence, ran from 1825 to 1955 and was the official French legal journal; it reported on court proceedings, trials and legal issues, and provided significant source material for novelists researching crime and criminals. In Modeste Mignon (1844), Balzac wrote : ‘La Gazette des tribunaux publishes novels not unlike Walter Scott’s, but with terrible endings and in real blood, not ink.’ 61

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the book collector

Other such series enjoyed great popularity in the mid-19th century, and these popular prints often became source material for later artists. Manet, whose modern, penetrating eye never failed to see things as they were, did not hesitate to choose his subjects from everyday life, including prostitutes; he must certainly have seen the chromolithographs of the 1850s before creating his notorious Olympia in 1863. Its scandalous subject matter – a confident courtesan wearing only a neck ribbon, earrings, a gold bracelet, some dainty slippers and a flower in her hair – echoes the chromolithographs from the 1850s, but instead of calling his subject by a street name, Manet chose ‘Olympia,’ a name associated with prostitutes, and one that was in Parent’s original list.

Having learned so much about Parent and his influence, I was still in the dark about the anonymous author of my dictionary, the anonymous homme de bien, until a short while ago. Thanks to persistence, luck and the Internet, which did not exist when I acquired the book, I identified him, and the circumstances surrounding the dictionary’s publication—and destruction. I had already been able to find the book listed by title in several bibliographies of French books, and that the Bibliothèque Nationale apparently had the only institutional copy extant, leading me to believe that the book was very rare, and to assume that the edition size had been small. But why would someone go to the trouble of compiling such a dictionary and print very few copies considering that the demand for such a book would have been enormous.21 Information on edition sizes prior to the late 19th century is difficult to find, and especially so for such an obscure book as the Dictionnaire—or so I thought.

From time to time, I would check the Internet to see if any new information had surfaced, and during a recent search, I found it cited in two obscure reference books that I did not know and had never seen before: Fernand Drujon’s Catalogue des ouvrages écrits et dessins de toute nature poursuivis, supprimés ou condamnés (1879) and Antoine Laporte’s Bibliographie contemporaine: Historie litteraire du dix-neuvième siècle (1887). Each citation had more information than was included in the standard bibliographies, which repetitively included 21. In contrast, Parent’s book, even the first edition of 1836, is readily available on several online rare book sites.

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