As I was planning my research stay at St Anne’s College, an unassuming tab on the website of the Bodleian libraries caught my attention “Taylor Institution Library: Special Collections: Manuscript holdings”. The page contains a 257-page pdf file with thousands of entries which all provide details of the manuscripts held at the Taylorian, ordered by language: Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.  

Among the eclectic collection of French letters, notes, proofs and other documents, one finds names such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Blaise Cendrars,  Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Auguste Rodin, Maurice Barrès, Alexandre Dumas, Émile Zola, Sarah Bernhardt, Jules Verne, Léon Bloy, Francis Carco, Edmond de Goncourt, Leconte de Lisle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Madame de Genlis, François Coppée, Camille Saint-Saëns, Félix Nadar, Eugène Ionesco, Louise Colet, Benjamin Constant, Stéphane Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, Jean Richepin, Anatole France, François-René de Chateaubriand, Romain Rolland, Pierre Louÿs, Ernest Renan, Roger Martin du Gard, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, Henri Barbusse, Paul Éluard, Théophile Gautier, Paul Valéry etc.

A first document in the collection is a touching short note dated 27 May 1857 from novelist George Sand (1804-1876) to a doctor, asking him to come and check on “little Marie” who is unwell and requesting he bring medicine with him. Although the child is not identified, the letter shows how attentive George Sand is to the well-being of those surrounding her.

A second document sheds light on the relationship between Émile Zola and the Vizetelly family of publishers and translators. In a short note from 28 October 1894, Zola authorises Edward Vizetelly to translate to English his 1867 Mystères de Marseille (republished in a renewed edition in 1884). The translation was published in 1895 as The Mysteries of Marseille and can be consulted online.

More relevant to my current research project on queer intellectuals in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the Taylorian collection contains a treasure trove of letters and manuscripts from Pierre Loti, André Gide, Laurent Tailhade, Rachilde, Paul Bourget, Colette, François Mauriac, Abel Hermant, Robert de Montesquiou, Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Jean Lorrain and Marcel Proust. Two discoveries stand out as important: the first one is an unpublished letter by Marcel Proust to Élisabeth de Gramont (1875-1954), Duchess de Clermont-Tonnerre. Philip Kolb had previously published only one paragraph of the letter in vol. XX (p. 334) of his edition of the Proust correspondence. Kolb copied the short excerpt from the Maison Charavay auction sale catalogue (October 1963), which identified the addressee correctly, but dates the letter to June 1921. The letter has a pencilled date of “28 June 1921”, as well as the indication “inédite” [unpublished], both in an unknown hand.

The dating of the letter seems odd to me and to my colleague François Proulx whom I consulted. He is Professor of French at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Associate Editor of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, member of the editorial boards of Bulletin d’informations proustiennes and Bulletin Marcel Proust. Proust writes to Élisabeth de Gramont that his current address is not 210 Boulevard Haussmann but 102. He moved to this address in 1907 and left it in 1919, making it highly unlikely that Élisabeth de Gramont would not know his correct address or that he would refer to an address where he no longer resided. Other details confirm the erroneous dating: the size of the paper as well as the watermark, barely visible in a corner of one of the pages.

The watermark, size and type of the paper allows us to compare this letter to one by Proust to Élisabeth de Gramont dated July 1907 and sold at auction in 2007. Same paper, same watermark, same topic: we can thus date the letter in the Taylorian manuscript collection to May or June 1907. It is one of the few letters between Proust and Élisabeth de Gramont that have been conserved, making it an important discovery. François Proulx and I are planning to publish the letter in Bulletin Marcel Proust in the near future. In 1910, the Duchess de Clermont-Tonnerre meets Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), after which she separates from her husband and starts a relationship with Clifford Barney that lasts until her death in 1954.

The second important discovery is the collection of documents by Laurent Tailhade (1854-1919), literary critic, poet and anarchist activist. The Taylorian holdings include fifty-seven letters by him and eight by his wife Marie-Louise Laurent-Tailhade (born Marie-Louise Pochon), also a writer. This is perhaps the largest known collection of unpublished letters by Tailhade and includes those written by him from the Santé prison where he was incarcerated between October 1901 and February 1902 after being condemned for publishing an article in the anarchist journal Le Libertaire calling for the assassination of Russian Czar Nicholas II during his state visit to Paris from 18 to 21 September 1901. In other letters, Tailhade writes about queer writers such as Achille Essebac (1868-1936), author of Dédé (1901), a hugely successful novel on the love between two schoolboys, and Colette (1873-1954), whose Claudine series of novels (1900-1903) narrate episodes of love between women.

More intriguing in the Tailhade collection is a short note from 27 November 1895 written to queer poet Paul Verlaine, whom he invites for dinner and addresses as “dear collaborator”. Paul Verlaine died just over a month later on January 8^th 1896. One wonders if the two friends managed to meet before this tragic end.

Last but not least among the Tailhade letters is one from October 4^th (the year is missing) to “Cher Edward” on squared paper. Written in a familiar tone it ends with “Je t’embrasse bien affectueusement” [I embrace you affectionately] and it is my contention that this is an extremely rare letter from Tailhade to his lover, publisher Edward Sansot (1864-1926). Only about a dozen letters from Tailhade to Sansot were previously known, after they were published in La Revue de L’Époque in 1921, but without any information on the relationship between the two men. Edward Sansot was Renée Vivien’s publisher; Vivien had previously been in a relationship with Natalie Clifford Barney, who had also been involved with Colette before meeting Élisabeth de Gramont. Natalie Clifford Barney held a literary salon in her house on 20, Rue Jacob in Paris, where many of the writers mentioned in this text – queer and heteronormative – met and discussed their writings as well as their loves, including Laurent Tailhade and Marcel Proust.

One can only hope that more researchers will work on the manuscript collection of the Taylor Institution Manuscript holdings. I can certainly attest that they contain real surprises.

This project was funded by the Research Foundation Flanders postdoctoral research fellowship Daring to speak love’s name. Collaborative strategies of queer intellectuals in Belgium, France and the Netherlands between 1885 and 1910 (project number 12C2323N). The research on the document collection at the Taylor Institution was made possible by a Plumer Visiting Research Fellowship at St Anne’s College from 1 February until 8 March 2025. The author would like to thank Patrick McGuinness at St Anne’s College and the staff at the Taylor Institution Library, especially Nick Hearn, Megan Speechley, Gareth Evans and Lindsey Evans.

Dr Michael Rosenfeld

Research Foundation Flanders postdoctoral fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Selected bibliography:

Albert, Nicole G.,  « Colette et Missy, un couple au sein du premier réseau queer », Sextant, n^o 40, 2023: https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.2108.

Burns, Colin, « Échanges franco-britanniques. Lettres inédites d’Émile Zola à Ernest Vizetelly (1891-1899) », Les Cahiers naturalistes, 1988, no. 62, p 61-96 and 1989, no. 63, p. 51-90.

Burns, Colin, « Échanges franco-britannique III. Lettres d’Émile Zola à Ernest Vizetelly (1899-1902) et à Chatto et Windus (1897-1900) », Les Cahiers naturalistes, 1990, no. 64, p. 105-133.

Burns, Colin, « Trois témoins de l’Affaire Dreyfus (Jacques Émile-Zola, Violette Vizetelly, René Dumesnil) », Les Cahiers naturalistes,  2001, no. 75, p. 373-380.

Demeure, Fernand, « Quelques lettres de Laurent Tailhade », La Revue de L’Époque, 3^e année, n^o 20, 3^me série, octobre 1921, p. 76-97.

Duriau, Nicolas, « Sociabilités homosexuelles et photographiques à l’ère de la reproductibilité technique. Illustrations littéraires dans L’Élu d’Achille Essebac (1902) », Sextant, n^o 40, 2023: https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.2134.

Intellectuel·les queer. Collaborations (1880-1920), Michael Rosenfeld (dir.), Sextant, n^o 40, 2023: https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.1838.

Islert, Camille, « Une écriture en partage ? Sur quelques renvois textuels entre Renée Vivien et Natalie Barney », Sextant, n^o 40, 2023: https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.1936.

Martin, Lowry, « Natalie Barney’s Salon. A Crucible for Sapphic Sisterhoods and Creative Networks », Sextant, n^o 40, 2023:  https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.2693.

Mon cher Maître : Lettres d’Ernest Vizetelly à Émile Zola, 1891-1902, Dorothy Speirs et Yannick Portebois (éd.), Montréal, Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2002.

Picq, Gilles, Laurent Tailhade ou De la provocation considérée comme un art de vivre, Maisonneuve & Larose, 2001.

Proust, Marcel, Correspondance, Philip Kolb (ed.), Paris, Plon, vol. XX, 1992.

Rapazzini, Francesco, Élisabeth de Gramont : avant-gardiste, Fayard, Paris, 2004.

Servantie, Alain and Michael Rosenfeld, “Jean Berge ou les illusions d’un dilettante”, Akademos. Mode d’emploi, Nicole Albert and Patrick Cardon (eds.), Éditions GayKitschCamp, Montpellier, 2022, p. 237-259.

Servantie, Alain,  « Un témoignage inédit des milieux intellectuels queer parisiens en 1888 », Sextant, n^o 40, 2023: https://doi.org/10.4000/sextant.2553.