Mémoires de M. Cléry, valet-de-chambre de Louis XVI, ou Journal de ce qui s'est passé dans la tour du Temple, pendant la détention de Louis XVI; avec des détails sur sa mort, qui ont été ignorés jusqu'à ce jour
Publisher: De l'Imprimerie de Baylis
Published: 1800
Place of publication: London France?
Language: fre
Number of pages: 208
Description: <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">12mo. pp. 192, with engraved frontispiece of the Tower. Bound in contemporary tan boards, red spine label. Small bookplate on front pastedown: “Ex Bibliotheca Josephi Schlemmer.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">First (?) edition of a remarkable imposture, described by ESTC as ‘a falsification of Cléry’s work,’ and recorded only at the British Library (10662.aa.29) and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Cléry (probably Jean-Baptiste Cant Hanet, also going by the last name Cléry) entered the service of the French royal family in 1782, and after the events of August 1792 spent five months in the Tour du Temple with the deposed and incarcerated Louis XVI, as his personal ‘valet de chambre,’ prior to the latter’s execution on 21 January 1793. Cléry himself was later freed, and fled to England, where in 1798 he published his memoirs of those last months of the monarchy, in a poignant but relatively apolitical tribute to the personal side of ‘le meilleur des Rois’ and his doomed son.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">This little book proved immensely popular at once, calling for at least eighteen editions in French, English, German and Italian in 1798 alone, with true or false imprints of (mostly) London, but also Dublin, Cork, Boston (Mass.), Hamburg, and Quebec. Although Cléry forbore to lay opprobrium on the Republicans, the pathos of his evocation was unmistakably influential upon public opinion in and outside France, and clearly called for some kind of response from the new government. Banning the book would merely extend its currency and encourage covert reprints, the authorities must have decided, for what they or their deputees settled on was devilishly ingenious instead: a skilfully rewritten version, retaining much of Cléry’s text (including the beginning, so you would have to persist to begin to realize what had been cut and what added, the latter pure and unabashed forgery). Immediately after the first (genuine) paragraph, the perpetrators inserted two full pages, in which the author is made to say that his original notes, given to a professional ‘littérateur’ to polish, were falsely altered to flatter the dead King, and cheer on enemies of the present regime; and that he (Cléry) disowned the entire 1798 version, and wished to replace it with a ‘corrected’ one.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">The creation of this clever, utterly misleading alternative text of the ‘Mémoires,’ whether or not government-sponsored propaganda, is sometimes attributed to François Daujon (1759-1811), but rather surprisingly, surviving specimens seem to be very rare. </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">ESTC online registers one other edition dated 1800 in ESTC, with a shorter pagination (pp. 2, 156), suggesting a reprint, located at BSB (again) and the Polish Academy of Sciences only. See also T. Ehrengardt, <a href="https://www.rarebookhub.com/articles/2345?id=2345" rel="nofollow">“Mr. Cléry and “Fake-Book”, or the Last Days of Louis XVI.”</a> Rare Book Monthly, 2018, 1.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_7138281" rel="nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a></span></span></p>