84 - SEGALEN (VICTOR)

SEGALEN (VICTOR) Stèles. Pei-King, published by Pei-T'ang Press, 1912. Volume in folio (288 x 142 mm), accordion-bound, 106 pp. (including the first 2 and last 3 blank endpapers), cream-colored paper cover with a printed title label pasted onto the front cover, the whole housed in a slipcase with the title painted in green on the spine of the slipcase and a paper case featuring a green-and-white ikat-style pattern. `Genuine first edition, in a limited, non-commercial print run of only 286 copies: 81 on Korean imperial paper (like the 81 slabs of the Temple of Heaven’s terrace), the first 21 of which were printed on heavy paper; 1 unnumbered proof copy on the same paper, 2 copies on Chine paper (one for himself, the other for his wife Yvonne), and 2 copies on Japon paper (one for himself, one as a reserve). These 86 copies were reserved for the author, his family, and his friends, including several prominent figures: Paul Claudel (to whom Segalen dedicated this work), Claude Debussy, André Gide, the philosopher Jules de Gaultier, and the sinologist Édouard Chavannes. The other 200 were printed on vellum. Set on the Lazarist presses in Beijing in May and June 1912 and published on August 13, 1912, this first edition is the only one corrected by Segalen himself; this contrasts with the second edition, the printing of which—too rapid for his taste—he was, to his regret, unable to oversee. “This edition, with its wood-engraved Chinese characters, will, I believe, constitute a novelty in bibliophilia, for it is not a European pamphlet decorated in the Chinese style, but an experiment in printing and typesetting in which Chinese bibliophilia plays a role equivalent to the conventions of European bookmaking: margins, titles, etc.,” from a letter by Victor Segalen addressed to Augusto Gilbert de Voisins in 1912. Complete with the three hand-stamped “cinnabar” red seals at the beginning and end of the volume: “古今碑录” (= “Collection of Ancient and Contemporary Steles”), “秘 园 之” (= “Seal of Mi Yuan,” “Mi Yuan”—meaning “Mysterious Garden”—was the author’s literary pseudonym reserved for close friends), “無 朝 心 宣” (= “Intimate Proclamation of the Wao Era [=without a dynasty],” the epigraph of the first stele in the collection). Excellent provenance: copy no. 49, featuring an AUTOGRAPHED DEDICATION to PIERRE LOTI “in respectful homage,” dated November 1912 and located in Changdefu. Both a “vision of China” and a major work of 20th-century French literature, this text is rooted in Segalen’s profound experience of the Chinese world. After beginning to study Chinese in 1908, he traveled to China three times: first as a doctor and explorer from 1909 to 1913, then on two archaeological missions in 1913–1914 and in 1917. These journeys gave rise to significant scientific works, notably the “First Report on the Archaeological Findings Obtained in Western China by the Mission of Gilbert de Voisins, Jean Lartigue, and Victor Segalen” (1914), published in two installments (1916) and later supplemented by an atlas (1923–1924). But this immersion also nourished his literary work, inspiring a series of books that explore and reimagine China in various forms, such as “Steles” (1912), “Paintings” (1916), and “Odes” (1926). “The Chinese world depicted in this work is a vast allegory of Segalen’s inner world, serving the inexpressible […] This intimate contact with the real China was complemented, through imaginative creation, by a mythical China: ‘It is neither Europe nor China that I have come here to seek, but a vision of China…,’ he wrote to Debussy. From then on, many of the texts he sketched out in the evenings during his travels would be transformed into poems. The “stele” form he adopted arose from a striking analogy between the stone tablets scattered throughout China and the “short, dense prose pieces” he intended to write even before he had seen them. Condensing and concentrating language was all the more necessary as he needed to capture those “divinatory moments” which, as he had said of Rimbaud, “define the essential poet.” (Henri Bouillier, in *En Français dans le texte*, Bnf, 1998, No. 340). A precious volume bringing together two indispensable figures among travel writers, Victor Segalen and Pierre Loti, whose paths were remarkably similar, at the crossroads of literature and military travel. Both were naval officers—Segalen as a naval surgeon, Loti as an officer—which led them to travel the world, particularly Asia and the distant territories of the colonial empire. These experiences profoundly shaped their work: in Loti’s case, they gave rise to stories marked by exoticism, nostalgia, and a certain idealization of the cultures he encountered, while Segalen developed a more intellectual approach