BONAPARTE, Marie. Edgar Poe. Paris: Denoel et Steele, 1933. Two volumes, tall octavo, 922pp (numbered continuously). Bonaparte was a disciple and translator of Freud, and was instrumental in his flight from Austria as she loaned him the money to pay for the ransom required by the Nazis and resorted to her diplomatic connections to concoct an exit option. She also saved Freud's archive of correspondence to Wilhelm Fliess, despite the fact that Freud wanted them destroyed. Freud himself provides an introduction to Bonaparte's book, a psychoanalytic literary biography of a figure to whom Freudian critics in France have returned compulsively. Her work is one of the first Freudian analysis of a particular author. Her most famous contention regarding Poe had to do with his impotence as brought about by a fixation related to his dying mother. The necrophilist fantasies expressed in the Ligeia story, among others, can be directly traced to his traumatic witnessing, at age three, of his mother's tragic death by consumption. The book was not published in English until 1949. Marie (1882-1962) was a great-grandniece of Napoleon Bonaparte and the wife of Prince George of Greece, and herself a Princess of Greece and Denmark. A movie about her life released in France in 2004 features Catherine Deneuve in the Role of Marie Bonaparte. This copy nicely inscribed by Bonaparte to the Abbé Mugnier (1879-1939), a colorful curate at the Saint Thomas d'Aquin and Salute Clotilde parishes in Paris and a life long friend of Edith Wharton. He was also the spiritual director of decadent author J.K. Huysmans who eventually was converted by the Abbe to Roman Catholicism. Huysmans's Au Rebours was, of course, the book that Oscar Wilde chose to be Dorian Gray's corruptor. Because of the situation of both churches where Mugnier served, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, on the Seventh Arrondissement on the Parisian Left Bank, he was the confessor and confidant of the French aristocracy and wrote about them in his Memoirs, some selections of which were published only recently, in 1985. Short edge-tears to several pages and front cover of each volume, else both partially unopened, very good or better in mildly soiled wraps.

• Category: History - Culture - Art - Philosophy - Literature
• Keywords: French Literature · Modern Thought
• Language: Englisch
• Inventory number: 458LB

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