Alphonse de LAMARTINE. Autograph poem, To Corinne, Saint-Point July 29, 1829; 5 pages in-4 (2 bifeuillets in notebook). Very beautiful and long poem for the young poetess Delphine Gay, who will become Mme de Girardin. Under a carefully crossed-out title, Lamartine has written the title "à Corinne" (in reference to Mme de Staël's heroine); in the upper right-hand corner, he has noted: "Harmonie 2ème volume", and on the last page of the notebook: "harmonie inédite du 2e vol. à Corinne", with a verse count. At the end of the poem, he wrote the date " St Point 29 Juillet 1829 ". The manuscript presents some slight variations with the published text. On November 3, 1831, Lamartine authorized Delphine, who had become Mme Émile de Girardin on June 1, to publish these verses; they appeared in Le Voleur of December 15, 1831 under the title: À une sœur en poésie - À Madame de Girardin, and were taken up in the keepsakes Le Talisman (December 1831) and L'Émeraude (January 1832). Lamartine collected this poem in 1832 in volume IV of his Œuvres (published by Gosselin in October 1832) under the title À Mlle Delphine Gay (and in the note: " Depuis Mme Émile de Girardin "), with, at the head of the poem, the date which appears at the end of the manuscript. The poem has 28 quatrains. "He who sees these Alps shining, from where the dawn Like an eagle, which takes its flight from the top of the mounts, With a sparkling wing opens the skies, and gilds The snows of their foreheads He, the eye struck by these sublime heights Believes that these icy mounts that he admires and that he flees Are only awful deserts, rocks, torrents, abysses, Lightning, storms and noise. [...] The star of the woman is the pale light Which hides itself the day in the starry azure Mysterious world that only to the eyelid The night revealed. On the forehead which admires it it gleams in silence It illuminates hardly a point of the firmament And of its soft rays the loving influence Ennyvre only a lover!"