Original manuscript of "L'archange byzantin" by Jean Lombard. Signed.

Marseille: 1887. 1p . 26.5 x 21cm. Paul Argyriadès Greek-born French revolutionary intellectuel, journalist, and lawyer (1849-1901)Né à Toulon, Jean Lombard (1854-1891), socialiste et écrivain, fut l’organisateur du Congrès ouvrier réuni à Marseille en 1879. On sait que Frédéric Mistral, républicain avancé en 1848, évolua assez vite vers des positions beaucoup plus modérées....Jean Lombard (26 September 1854 – 17 July 1891) was a French novelist of the late nineteenth century. Lombard was born in Toulon, Var. His work, with its themes of orientalism, androgyny and paganism, had deep affiliations with the Decadent movement in literature. Although almost completely forgotten today, he influenced contemporaries such as Rachilde and Jean Lorrain. His best-known work, based on the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, is L'agonie (1888), for which Octave Mirbeau wrote a preface.....He became editor of various literary magazines. In Marseilles, Lombard put himself up as a labor candidate but he was never elected. His disgust with the political practice of his day made him turn full time to writing. In 1889 he settled in Paris where he enjoyed a brief but moderately succesfull literary reputation after the publication of two historical novels, l’Agonie (1888) and Byzance (1890). Lombard died in Paris, at the age of thirty-seven, in desperate poverty, leaving an illiterate but devoted wife and three small children. Ten years after Lombard’s death, both Byzance and l’Agonie were re-printed – in that order -, the latter with an introduction by Octave Mirbeau, himself writer of the thoroughly decadent Jardin des supplices from 1899 (published in English, by Dedalus, under the title: Torture garden, in 1995). History has not been kind to Jean Lombard. He was forgotten quite soon after he died. French literary surveys hardly mention him at all. In his Histoire de la littérature française contemporaine de 1870 à nos jours (1947, in 2 volumes), René Lalou devotes two lines to Lombard, stating that his historical novels are honestly illegible, ‘des cacographies’. It must be said that l’Agonie indeed is very difficult to read. Lombard’s lack of classical education does not help...... Provenance Estate of Paul Lombard. Né en 1889, Paul Lombard a été rédacteur en chef de la revue L’Homme libre, journal de Clémenceau, et critique littéraire sous le pseudonyme de Louis Méritan. Paul Lombard est de ces critiques qui, comme l’a montré Thierry Laget (Proust, Prix Goncourt, Gallimard, 2019), reprochaient à l’Académie Goncourt d’avoir décerné leur prix à un écrivain trop vieux, trop riche : "Au lieu de cela, cette année, le prix Goncourt […] échoit à M. Proust [qui] n’est pas jeune : il a conquis en peu de jours une notoriété dont j’ignore le secret ; le prix Goncourt, même s’il l’a mérité, ne lui sera d’aucune utilité", déplore-t-il dans L’Homme libre du 11 décembre 1919 (p. 2). Probablement aurait-il préféré que Les Croix de bois de Dorgelès remportât de prix, d’autant que l'écrivain avait été un collaborateur régulier de L’Homme libre......Expertise by Ségolène Beauchamp, 86bis rue de Bellébat, 45000 Orléans and Pierre Prévost, 75 rue Michel Ange, 75016 Paris.