LEMMONNIER, Camille. ~ Quand j’étais homme. Cahiers d’une femme … Paris: Louis-Michaud, [1907].
8vo (195 × 134 mm), pp. 308, [2], plus three final blanks; uncut in the original publisher’s illustrated wrappers, spine creased, a few chips at extremities.
First edition of a confessional novel by Lemonnier (1845–1913), the Belgian writer and art critic who ‘shared the aims of the French symbolists and stimulated a revival of Belgian letters’ (Oxford Companion to French Literature), in which the female narrator writes against a male-dominated society which leaves no room for the possibility of female emancipation such that she is driven to dress as a man.
This copy belonged to the ‘high priest of fin-de-siècle bibliophilia’ (Silverman, The New Bibliopolis, p. 14), Octave Uzanne (1851–1931). One of only ten numbered copies printed on vergé de Hollande, it includes a unique printed presentation leaf, ‘Cet exemplaire a été imprimé spécialement pour M. Octave Uzanne’, tipped in as pp. 1–2 and inscribed ‘En fidèle souvenir mon cher Uzanne, le double homage de l’éditeur et de l’auteur. Camille Lemonnier’.
‘There is no more original Belgian artist than Camille Lemonnier. A powerful and fertile writer, he represents Belgian literary activity for more than forty years, until his death in 1913, and even if he reflect the various tendencies of the French mind, and adapt himself to his surroundings, he is Flemish to the backbone in his mystico-sensual leanings, in his pious materialism, … in his Rubens-like fertility and love of colour, dash and force. It is true that he reminds the reader of Zola, and even of Dickens; but it is above all of Rubens and Jordaens that he makes us think, because, like them, he paints his imagination in the form of ever sensitive emotions’ (Gladys Turquet-Milnes, Some modern Belgian Writers, 1916, p. 87).