Paris dans l’eau ... Illustré par Bertall. Paris: (Imprimerie Schneider and Langrand for) J. Hetzel, 1844.
8vo (190 x 130 mm). [2] leaves (half-title and title), 138 pp., [1] leaf (publisher’s ads). Wood-engraved title vignette and 124 wood-engraved illustrations, including full-page frontispiece and a full page-border, by various engravers after Bertall. (Half-title slightly foxed; the usual faint discoloration of paper, else fine). Publisher’s gilt- and blind-stamped brown cloth (percaline), yellow-coated endpapers (slightly stained apparently from paste; spine a trifle sunned). ***
First edition of a “physiognomie” of Parisian aquatic life. This humorous account of of le tout Paris bathing, boating, fishing and swimming is illustrated with wood-engraved vignettes after the prolific caricaturist and illustrator Bertall (pseudonym of Charles Albert, vicomte d'Arnoux, 1820-1882).
Briffault describes the various sections of the Seine, characteristics of those who frequent it (for whom he coins the term “Séquaniens”), past and present Paris bathhouses, the benefits of swimming and different strokes, requirements and typical personalities of maître nageurs (swim instructors), and women’s bathhouses (which were still frowned upon by the upper classes, and for which he relies on the report of un bas-bleu de nos amis, façon d’Androgyne au moral).
His text is admirably completed by Bertall’s inimitable vignettes, in a variety of sizes and shapes (as are their human subjects), around which the typographer wrapped the text. These delightful and funny wood-engravings show everyday Parisians with all their foibles: a fisherman with his family dangling their feet along a riverbank while their boy stretches and dog yawns; a wet swimmer blowing his nose; scrawny children and lumpy grownups learning to swim; an old lady spying through a telescope on her half-naked fellow citizens; and real Paris women (not the idealized “Parisiennes”), smoking and drinking. Scenes of the Seine include classic Paris views of quais, the peculiar winding-staired structure of a diving board, and the bathing establishments which had cropped up suddenly a few years earlier (p. 68), including bathhouses on barges and other unusual architectural features, such as the exotic keyhole-shaped entrance of the bains de Chaillot.
Appearing in parts in the summer of 1844, this was the first of four illustrated books on Paris published by Hetzel in 1844-46, sometimes referred to as the “Petit tableau de Paris,” although they were published separately. Bertall and Briffault’s most famous collaboration was the fourth volume of this series, Paris à table (1846); the other volumes were Paris au bal by Huart (1845), and Balzac’s Paris marié, Philosophie de la vie conjugale (1845), an extract from the Petites misères de la vie conjugale (published the same year, also illustrated by Bertall).
Unlike the other Hetzel volumes on Paris, this one is oddly absent from US libraries; I locate only the Morgan copy.
Carteret, Trésor du bibliophile III: 468; Vicaire, Manuel de l'amateur de livres I: 925-26; Beraldi, Les graveurs du XIX siècle II: 45-46 (no. 6). Item #2382
Price: $650.00