ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE.

Album of autograph manuscripts and drafts. Circa 1820-1823. Small oblong in-4 [160x196 mm], half green Russian leather, Chaulin Papetier du roi label, modern midnight blue half-maroquin slipcase. Exceptional first draft autograph document containing La Mort de Socrate and five Nouvelles Méditations, some in draft form. Written in pencil or ink, the pages of the album offer numerous corrections and variants, as well as sketches or remarks in the margin. "Here is a very confidential album that has been intended for you for a long time. You will see that it is the one on which I scribbled Socrate les preludes les etoiles, le chant d'amour", specifies the author in a note to Louis Aimé-Martin mounted at the head. "It is my child of predilection, it is an episode of my great poem, it is the compendium of a doctrine to which I would like to give life", will say Lamartine, about the Death of Socrates (letter to the marquise of Montcalm of September 28, 1823). "This poem, often neglected, will still maintain Marie-Renée Morin "is one of the most beautiful poems, philosophical of the XIXth century by the quality of the thought and also of the style, often close to that of the Parnassians (Lamartine, le poète et l'homme d'État, Bibliothèque nationale, 1969, n° 147) It appeared in September 1823 at Ladvocat, at the same time as the Nouvelles Méditations poétiques at Urbain Canel. Some of these meditations go back, however, to the first stay of the poet in Italy, in 1820. Composition : - Adieux à la mer. July 12 (?) 1823. 6 pages. Manuscript in pencil of 18 stanzas of 5 verses; 4 autograph corrections to the last stanza, thirteen variants. According to the Pléiade editor Marius-François Guyard, this is the only known autograph manuscript of the poem. - Song of love. Undated [Ischia, ca. 1820]. 15 pages. 34 stanzas, 4 of them crossed out. Various drafts. 5 pages. 7 stanzas, some in several versions. - Meditation 8eme. Socrate or Immortality. Paris, March 20, 1823. 48 pages. 42 stanzas, of which two entirely erased. One stanza has been corrected by the author by means of a sheet mounted in the album with the comment "description of Myrtle more sensitive". It is a clean, reworked version, richer in variants than the manuscript kept in the archives of Saint-Point, dated February 27, 1823 described by Marius-François Guyard. - Les Étoiles]. Without place or date. 12 pages. Autograph drafts in pencil, with many passages crossed out and taken over from the last three stanzas. - [Song of Love]. No place or date. 14 pages, plus two drafts of 4 and 5 lines. Second part of autograph sketches. - Apparition. No place or date. 2 pages. The first two stanzas of the poem with a variant and part of the fifth stanza with a variant respectively. - [Liberty or A Night in Rome]. 2 pages. Pencil manuscript of the fourth stanza, corrected and with variants. The notebook ends with a page of accounts, a list of poems and the five stanzas of Chant d'amour with corrections on the title page. Provenance: Louis Aimé-Martin, autograph note from Lamartine dated June 12, 1839, mounted at the head. Man of letters, curator of the Sainte-Geneviève library, Louis-Aimé Martin (1782-1847) was among the most faithful friends of Lamartine. Son-in-law of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, his library dispersed in 1847-1848 gathered for the first time in the annals of bibliophily a considerable number of annotated books, marking his interest for the autograph traces of the great writers - Louis Barthou, with ex-libris (sale I, 1935, n° 397). Louis Barthou, fervent admirer of the poet, had devoted an article to Lamartine and Aimé- Martin in the Revue de Paris of October 1925.