ABSTRACT
Early in the summer of 2002, I was idly perusing a Dutch book catalogue on the internet, when my eye was caught by a strange entry:
BULWER LYTTON, E., Athens; its Rise and Fall. With Views of the Literature, Philosophy, and Social Life of the Athenian People. Galignani, Paris, 1837. XII, 469p. Bound. Bit rust stained. Ex libris. a 29.50
Bulwer Lytton was of course known to me as the author of The Last Days of Pompeii, and other novels, the Knebworth edition of which I had once bought for £2 in a leather-bound set, in my fin-de-siècle days, to decorate my study at school, and in one of which I had carefully hollowed out a secret container to hide my cigarettes from a prowling housemaster. But I did not recall ever having come across any reference to a work of history with such a grandiose title by this prolific novelist of whom I had not then read a word, and the entry intrigued me. What was he writing in 1837, and why was his work published by an Italian living in Paris in that very street, the Rue Vivienne, where the much revered ancient Bibliothèque Nationale was once housed, and where I had recently been shown the site of the new Getty-style Institut national de l’histoire de l’art, which is to be combined with the Centre
research institute in Europe, planned by my friend Alain Schnapp? So after some hesitation, having carefully considered the price and my wife’s probable reaction to yet another useless tome, I ordered the book.
