Les oeuvres du Sieur Hadoux, commentées expliquées et rendues intelligibles. Enrichies d'un portrait, de l'auteur, et autres Pièces intéressantes. Par André Rhiba d'Acunenga, Professeur omni genere.

A Criticopolis, l'an des Muses 10101 (Belgique, 1783). 8vo. 187 pages. Contemporary half-calf, flat ornate spine. First edition. Extraordinary satirical "mise en abyme" on literary creation, especially theatrical creation, and on the theory of literature by the adventurer and political activist Pierre-Auguste Brahain Ducange, whose son Victor Ducange (1783-1833) was one of the most original playwrights of the French scene of his time. Born in Holland, Ducange Sr. was first the teacher of a French family residing in Amsterdam, then secretary of the French embassy in Holland. Dismissed from his post for leaking sensitive diplomatic information to Dutch newspapers, he devoted himself to journalism and then went to Spain where he is said to have survived through various scams. Returning to the Netherlands around 1790, he resumed his journalistic activities and directed the Leiden Gazette, written in French, before emigrating to Paris where he became close to Jacobin circles and published a new periodical entitled "Le Batave, ou le Sans-Culotte". A collaborator of the police during the Terror, he fled to Germany after the fall of Robespierre and engaged in new criminal activities before returning to Holland in 1797, again in the service of the ambassador of France whom he was suspected of having spied to report to Barras. It was in his capacity as agent of the French ambassador that he took an important part in the coup d'état of 22 January 1798 in the Netherlands, using his position as interpreter to deceive French diplomacy and promote the establishment of a radical government in Holland. After the fall of the latter we lose track of him until 1803 when we find him again in the service of the French government, this time in Vienna as a spy. Unmasked by the Austrian authorities, he had time to flee to Saxony and then returned to France, where he was imprisoned in the Temple for several years. Released in 1806, he was arrested again and convicted of fraud in 1808. Almost nothing is known of his life after this date, except that he published "Le Secrétaire des enfans, ou Correspondance entre plusieurs enfans propre à les former au style épistolaire" (1821), which suggests that he had sought to resume his duties as teacher. In 1826 his last work appeared, a novel for young people entitled "Aventures d'un jeune français ou la puissance du caractère". The present book was motivated by a very different inspiration. Through his commentary on the fictional work of an equally fictitious Dutch dance master, the author engages in an astonishing exercise in deconstructing literary criticism where the absurd competes with the inept. One cannot help but think of the fictions elaborated by Borges, as well as the questioning of literary history and its conventions as it was undertaken by the Surrealists, nearly a century and a half later. The works commented on are supposed to have been printed separately but they are reproduced in their entirety in the work (in the form of two plays to which are attached insignificant extracts from correspondence and other occasional pieces), Printed clandestinely in Belgium and under the veil of anonymity, it is a work of great rarity of which we have been able to locate only a handful of copies in the public collections, all preserved in Europe (BNF, Bibliothèque de Bordeaux, British Library and Universitätsbibliothek Augsburg). Beautiful copy in its original binding. Soleinne, Bibliothèque Dramatique, 2296: "Incroyable monument du style et de l'orthographe de l'auteur franco-hollandais". Catalogue de la Bibliothèque dramatique du baron Taylor, 1186: "Volume fort rare. C'est une singulière facétie, une critique grotesque d'un sieur Hadoux. maître de danse à La Haye. Ce volume contient deux comédies : le Dragon Vert et le Petit Cabaret, chacune en un acte et en prose". Brunet, Imprimeurs imaginaires et libraires supposés, p.281. Rouveyre, Connaissances nécessaires à un bibliophile, p.207-208: "Ces œuvres se composent de pièces de théâtre et de poésies très mal écrites". Weller, Falsche Druckorte, p.221. On Brahain Ducage's life and in particular his role in the coup d'état in Holland in 1798, cf. the biography of general Daendels by Mendel, "Hermann Willem Daendels" (1890).