FRENCH LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS (1550-1850) IN AUSTRALIAN LIBRARIES

Abstract

THERE are over 990 French manuscripts, dating roughly from 1550 to 1850, in Australian libraries. In size they range from multivolume diaries and treatises to scribbled memoranda and terse requisition-slips. In scope they include documents signed by every French king (and most of their queens and most of their cousins) from Fran~is I (1515-47) to Louis Philippe (1830-48). More than forty letters of patent, promissory notes, personal letters derive from the House of Bourbon, and are matched, in numbers if not in ideology,by a clutch of militaryorders, proclamations and directives signed by Napoleon Bonaparte, his generals and other revolutionary henchmen. Now joined together and at peace, in their elaborate 19th century albums, the royals and republicans hold still a dominant position in Australian manuscript collections. Noble monograms and wax seals however were not the only items coveted by yesterday's libraries or collectors. Together with Henri Ill's crisp order to the Duke of Aumone, 'et si vous passez a Vichy vous au~ezsoing de faire rompre Ie pont apres vostre passaige pour donner aultant de retardemt a ceulx qui vous vouldroyent suivre' (Paris, 26.VI.1585: NU 1.17. The librarycodes are listed at the end of the article), present Australian holdings might include a letter from Luzio Casabianca (Paris, 29.IX. 1797: VLT) praising his son Jocante apotheosized in moist Victorian eyes by Mrs Dorothea Hemans' 'The boy stood on the burning deck') or a graphic account of midshipman Raxis de Flassan, subsequently of the ill-starred Astrolabe, describing the death of Captain de la Jaille, struck down by 'une multitude de barbares armes de fleches empoisonnees . . . portant des boucliers faits d'oreille d'elephant' (Brest, 23.IV.1785: NM C206/12). Alongside the elevated, the bizarre or the simply curious, items of Australiana interest inevitably predominate. Not all are logbooks, or diaries, or countersigned duplicates of naval orders. The letters of Joseph Fidele Eugene du Bouzet, midshipman on La Thetis, showboth sensitivity and an innate feeling for the important detail as he chronicles for his parents in Paris his circumnavigation