[Victor HUGO]. Gustave PLANCHE (1808-1857). Autograph manuscript signed Les feuilles d'automne par Victor Hugo, [1831]; 4 pages in-4, on the back of letterhead of the Revue des Deux Mondes. Interesting article on the poetry of Victor Hugo. The manuscript, which bears a few erasures and corrections, seems to be prepared for printing, but it is Sainte-Beuve's article on Les Feuilles d'Automne that will be published in the Revue des Deux Mondes of December 1831. ...The publication of Les Feuilles d'Automne by Renduel is, for Planche, the occasion to come back on Victor Hugo's previous works, poems and novels, and on what these works represent in a life generally devoted to success and to the passionate attention of the critics, finally to make the necessary comparison. For him, this collection marks a new stage in the life of the poet. The preceding collections could recall some great ancients, such as Pindar or Horace. The Orientales, with their profusion of images, too often disguised the simplicity of the ideas, whereas, in Les Feuilles d'Automne, the poet seems to understand "that he had arrived at the last limits of the poetic phraseology, that he had exhausted the last resources of the language, that he could not make a step more without arriving at confusion and obscurity [...He thus held on to the strings that he had found"; but "he did not this time make vibrate all those that we knew him and of which he was the master". It is a new poetic cycle which opens. The criticisms of Planche are focused on the form and on "the metric modifications brought to the system that the author followed until now: are they purely personal and spontaneous, or are they imitated, come from elsewhere, inspired from further away [...] The slope of the reverie seems to us a reminder of the Dantesque process [...] The ode to M. Lamartine reproduces the forms and the movement of the Meditations, the ode to David statuary is not without analogy with the ode to M. de Bonald. de Bonald"... If he praises the beautiful inspirations of the poet, Planche finds that he uses "too often the rhyme for the developments and the evolution of his ideas that instead of framing his thought in the meter, he takes willingly the meter as an instrument of study and invention" He proceeds "from the word to the idea, rather than from the idea to the word"...