Pierre LOUŸS. Autograph manuscript, Un roman inédit de Restif, [1913]; 12pages in-4 in violet ink (the end is missing). Study on an unpublished novel by Restif de la Bretonne L'Enclos et les Oiseaux, published in the Revue des Livres anciens (1913, no. 1). Restif's manuscript, completed in 1797, was "a collection of Revies and sixty miscellaneous short stories brought together in a single novel by the artificial network of an enormous and singular tale". According to Louÿs, "Restif had no freedom of imagination [...] inventing a character and lending him adventures was a cerebral task too complex for his faculties [...] So he did not hesitate to repeat the same story several times, under several different aspects, as a painter makes replicas of the same painting by changing the accessories". Thus, an anecdote about his daughter Agnès exists in five versions; Monsieur Nicolas is a reworking of Le Paysan perverti and La Femme infidèle. Cazotte suggested the idea of "writing the diary of his past life as it might have been had he been happy. [...] Restif replied with the Revies, stories remade under another hypothesis of the Human Heart Revealed". Only a small part was printed by Restif as an appendix to the Posthumes (1802), which were seized, the rest of the Revies being published in l'Enclos et les Oiseaux. At Restif's death, the work "remained unpublished; it is still unpublished; it is even lost, and has been for a long time". By chance, Louÿs found a page of the lost manuscript in an autograph catalog, and later a few pages that had remained with a dealer who had not identified the manuscript and had dispersed it. He therefore happened to have 46 pages of the book; he appealed to collectors... Attached are 3 autograph pages (2 signed), the end of a study by P. Louÿs on Rouen printers Raphaël du Petit-Val, Abraham Cousturier and Louys Costé. Plus a folder of letters and poems by Barthélemy Imbert, including a translation of poems from Les Baisers de Johannes Secundus (Jean Second).