ABSTRACT
In 1934 the French bookseller-publisher Charles Hirsch published clandestinely a French translation of an obscene English novel under the title Teleny: Etude Physiologique. It is the tragic and libidinous love story of two men, Camille Des Grieux and René Teleny, set in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and influenced by Abbé Prévost’s French novel about star-crossed love, money, and infidelity, Manon Lescaut (1731). Hirsch’s two-volume edition included his important “Notice Bibliographique Extraite Des Notes et Souvenirs D’un Vieux Bibliopole” which relayed a fascinating story about the novel’s composition and publication history. According to Hirsch, a group of men used his French bookshop in London, the Librairie Parisienne, to exchange the working manuscript of Teleny. One night sometime in 1890, when the manuscript was less sedulously packaged, he read it in full, noticing its obscenity, but also the many different hands involved in the composition. Most remarkably, he claims that Oscar Wilde, the celebrated playwright, was the mastermind behind the round-robin project, having been the one to broach Hirsch about using the Librairie Parisienne as the drop-off site. In 1893, after a few years of hearing nothing further, Hirsch came across a clandestine publication of the novel, renamed Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal. A Physiological Romance of To-day, published by Leonard Smithers, the infamous publisher to the Decadents. He noticed that a number of changes had been made: most importantly, the novel’s action was relocated from London to Paris. When he subsequently met Smithers at the Exposition Universelle de Paris in 1900, he asked him about the revisions and excisions, and Smithers explained that he had not wanted to shock his English subscribers. When Hirsch finally published his French edition of the novel, more than forty years later, he restored the novel to its original setting and added missing material. Ironically, while the London edition was set in Paris, the Paris edition was set in London.
