93 - VIGNY (Alfred de). Signed autograph letter [to the poet and translator Auguste Lacaussade]. No place, February 23, 1842. One page, in-8.

VIGNY (Alfred de). Signed autograph letter [to the poet and translator Auguste Lacaussade]. No place, February 23, 1842. One page, in-8. “How could I not be moved by the kindness you have shown, Sir, in sending me this Ossian, whom you have revitalized with a new translation that is more literal than the others? MACPHERSON HAS CERTAINLY DONE FOR OSSIAN WHAT CHATTERTON DID FOR MONK ROWLEY, but what does it matter if the problem is impossible to solve? ItWHAT MATTERS TO US IS TO SEE ONCE MORE THE BEAUTIFUL, MELANCHOLY SHADOWS OF LAMENTING MAIDENS AND FIERCE WARRIORS WANDERING BEFORE US—THOSE WHOM THE FIRST CONSUL LOVED TO SET AS AN ESCORT, AMONG THE CLOUDS TO HIS GENERALS DESAIX AND KLEBER. I owe you this sweet and somber reverie that I am about to experience once more, and I thank you for it... ” The English poet Thomas Chatterton, whose short and dramatic life inspired a famous Romantic drama by Alfred de Vigny, had published his own works under the name of an imaginary medieval monk, Thomas Rowley. James Macpherson had done the same by attributing his own works to a legendary Gaelic bard, Ossian: Napoleon Bonaparte had a particular fondness for the poems of Ossian/Macpherson, and Auguste Lacaussade had just published a new translation of them in 1842 (Paris, Henri Delloye).