Le Parnasse satyrique / The Satyrical Parnassus (1864-81)

Le Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Recueil de vers piquants et gaillards. 2 vols. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. Rome: À l’enseigne des sept péchés capitaux [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1864. Lilly Library: PQ1181 .P256 v. 1-2.

Le Nouveau Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. Eleutheropolis: Aux devantures des libraires [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1866. Lilly Library : 6-4568.

Le Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Recueil de pièces facétieuses, scatologiques, piquantes, pantagruéliques, gaillardes et satyriques. Édition augmentée et complétée. Bruxelles: Sous le manteau [Henry Kistemaeckers], 1881. Kinsey Institute Library: 841.007 P25 1881 v. 1.

Le Nouveau Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle. Édition revue, corrigée, complétée et augmentée de nombreuses pièces nouvelles, inconnues et inédites. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. À Bruxelles: Avec l’autorisation des compromis [Henry Kistemaeckers], 1881. Kinsey Institute Library: 841.007 P25 1881 v. 3.

Gautier, Théophile. Les Jeunes-France. Romans goguenards. Frontispiece by Félicien Rops. Amsterdam: À l’Enseigne du coq [Brussels: Poulet-Malassis], 1866. Kinsey Institute Library: 843.7 G27 j5 1866.

Le Parnasse satyrique du dix-neuvième siècle is an impressive anthology in two volumes, followed by the Nouveau Parnasse satyrique, of licentious French poetry by Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Albert Glatigny, Stéphane Mallarmé, among many other poets, on the model of the seventeenth-century Parnasse satyrique attributed to Théophile de Viau, as well as the eighteenth-century Parnasse libertin, also exhibited here. The anthology was clandestinely edited by the publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis during his exile in Belgium in 1864, probably with the complicity of Baudelaire and other poets. Several copies of the anthology were seized by French customs when Poulet-Malassis tried to smuggle them into Paris, and the publisher was sentenced in absentia by a French court on June 2, 1865. The Parnasse satyrique was the first edition in which the six condemned poems of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal were reprinted, and the second volume includes a facsimile of Baudelaire’s autograph dedication of his collection of verse to Gautier. Many reprints and new editions of the anthology were circulating in the late nineteenth century, including the expanded edition exhibited here, clandestinely printed by the Belgian publisher Henry Kistemaeckers in 1881, before it became almost forgotten in the twentieth century. Les Jeunes-France, the 1833 collection of novellas by Théophile Gautier, has little to do with the licentious anthology, but the frontispiece created by Félicien Rops for the reissue of the novel in 1866 may be considered an illustration of the Parnasse satyriques, to the extent that it represents several Romantic poets featured in the anthology, including Hugo, Musset, Gautier, and Baudelaire, gathered around a naked and lascivious muse.