Petit Memoires/ Madame Heurteaux: "A Disturbing and curious love story"

A MANUSCRIPT SHORT STORY OF "LESBIAN DECADENCE"

MAIZEROY, René (pseud. of Baron René Jules Jean Toussaint, 1856-1918). AMsS, Petit Mémoires/ Madame Heurteaux. Approx. 1100 words in the author's small hand, 8vo, 4pp (rectos only), each leaf pasted in old 1/2 cloth binder. [Paris: 1884].

A manuscript short story concerned with eroticism, published as the fifth and last volume of the author's "collection curieuse...histoire d'amour troublantes et curieuses, enfermés dans une couverture très coquette," Les amours deféndues (Paris: 1884), published title simply, Madame Heurteaux. Maizeroy was a friend of Guy de Maupassant who based his character of "Duroy" on him in his novel Bel-Ami. A contemporary wrote of Maizeroy that he "is one of the most elegant of our present men of letters; many of his pages are chiseled with the most masterly and artistic strokes."-Rosine Mellé, The Contemporary French Writers (1894), p. 78. Maizeroy's portrait was painted by Edouard Manet in 1883. For Les amouirs deféndues, see Ashbee, Biblotheca Arcana 449, which says, "The stories are free, but not verbally obscene." Listed by Nicole G. Albert, Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-Siècle France (2016). Les amours deféndues is recorded by Bibliographie de France 10129, and noticed and summarized in Bulletin de Imprimerie et de la Libraire, January, 1884, p. 284. Leaves toned, otherwise fine.