Marceline DESBORDES-VALMORE. Poem – “The Mouse in a Judge’s House.”

Marceline DESBORDES-VALMORE (1786.1859)

Autograph manuscript – The mouse at a judge’s house.

Six pages in-4° in brown ink.

Without place or date [1823-24]

Magnificent and long manuscript consisting of one hundred and forty-six verses – in perfect state of preservation – of his poem The Mouse at a Judge published in his collection Élégies et Poésies nouvelles (Ladvocat. 1825). The manuscript presents fourteen unpublished verses (repeated in later editions) as well as numerous variants with the first edition printed in 1825.

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The mouse at a judge's house

Trembling, trapped and barely breathing,

recklessly leaving the maternal stay,

dreaming his last hour to the sole sound of his chain

a young mouse saw daylight falling.

In the narrow fence that holds her prisoner,

passed the brilliant light with a torch,

she trembles, listens: a silence of peace,

follows the movement that froze her with fear,

and an old wall, hidden under thick curtains,

we heard this humble and sweet complaint come out:

….

she was silent. The judge then: hey! quickly !

she is trapped, hurry and run.

strangle this poor little thing;

I don't like to see people suffer.

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To the sadness she experienced at a young age: a family ruined by the Revolution, an odyssey in Guadeloupe from which she returned an orphan, was later added a deep romantic disappointment caused by Hyacinthe Thabaud. Several of the compositions in Élégies et Poésies nouvelles are inhabited by the haunting image of this man.

The reader would be tempted to find in this poem where a judge, symbol of authority, power, harshness, acts as the executioner of a poor mouse trapped and pleading, the memory of Marceline's lover-tormentor and the echo of his sorrows. The poet lends her voice to all the weak, the destitute, sensitive to all human suffering which she expresses in penetrating formulas of simplicity, such as this evocation of death, “ formidable enemy of everything that breathes ”.

Former Alexandrine collection by ROTHSCHILD (sale of February 26, 1969, n°25)

Sale Sickles. November 10, 1990 (No. 1096).