oltaire. v
“Je suis né pour célébrer les Saints: ma lyre, ou viele est tant soit peu profane: Je veut pourtant vous chanter cette Jeanne”. The first line differs from the printed editions of 1755 to 1762 which read “Vous m’ordonnez de célébrer des Saints”. The “Je suis né” incipit was however re-adopted by Voltaire in the final, definitive editions of 1773-5, which might date the manuscript to those printings. However this line also appears in manuscripts that predate the first printing, such as in a 14 canto manuscript at Wolfenbüttel dated to 1752-55 by Bauer and to early 1755 by Vercruysse (the Wolfenbüttel manuscript is described in an interesting article by Bauer.)1 This first line also appears in another early manuscript, the Munich manuscript, also in fourteen cantos, from the library of The Elector Charles Philippe Theodore de Sulzbach. The Wolfenbüttel manuscript also contains many variant lines which follow earlier manuscripts. The second line in our manuscript, ‘ma lyre, ou vielle est tant soit peu profane:’ is different to all the printed editions, which read “Ma voix est faible, et meme un peu profane.” It does however correspond exactly to the line as it appears in Madame Denis’ manuscript which Vercruysse dates to ‘after 1742’. The same goes for the third line which in all the printed editions reads “Il faut pourtant”. Again however our manuscript follows the earlier reading that corresponds to Madam Denis’ manuscript. These three lines also occur in another pre-publication manuscript recently described by Nicholas Cronk, in the New York Public library, in the Martin J. Gross collection of selected manuscripts of Voltaire 1727-1778. He describes this manuscript thus. “The NYPL manuscript seems to be a good example, perhaps the best that has so far come to light, of ‘mon veritable ouvrage’, that is, of the type of ‘authorised’ manuscript of La Pucelle that Voltaire issued (‘published’) at the time of the Grasset affair and the appearance of the first unauthorised printed editions” (Cronk p. 129). Our manuscript shares many similarities with the text of the NYPL copy, which is also very complete in fifteen cantos, though ours would seem to predate the NYPL manuscript in terms of its closeness to earlier manuscripts. For example, a little further on in the first canto, lines 15, 16 and 17 in our manuscript read: “Bien le verrez, si lisez cet ouvrage. Vous Fremirés de ses exploits nouveaux; mais le plus grand de ses rares travaux [fut de garder un an son pucelage.]” 1
Bauer. Eine unbekannte Handschrift der ‘Pucelle d’Orleans’ von Voltaire.
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