Editing Comte de Lautréamont (section)

===Years in Paris===
After a brief stay with his father in Montevideo, Ducasse settled in Paris at the end of 1867. He began studies in view of entering the [[École Polytechnique]], only to abandon them one year later. Continuous allowances from his father made it possible for Ducasse to dedicate himself completely to his writing. He lived in the "Intellectual Quarter", in a hotel in the ''Rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires'', where he worked intensely on the first [[canto]] of ''Les Chants de Maldoror''. It is possible that he started this work before his passage to Montevideo, and also continued the work during his ocean journey.

Ducasse was a frequent visitor to nearby libraries, where he read [[Romanticism|Romantic]] literature, as well as scientific works and encyclopaedias. The publisher Léon Genonceaux described him as a "large, dark, young man, beardless, mercurial, neat and industrious", and reported that Ducasse wrote "only at night, sitting at his piano, declaiming wildly while striking the keys, and hammering out ever new verses to the sounds".  However, this account has no corroborating evidence, and is considered unreliable.<ref>Knight, pp. 7-8.</ref><ref>{{cite journal |url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n21/harry-mathews/shark-shagger |title=Shark-Shagger |last1=Mathews |first1=Harry |journal=London Review of Books |date=November 2, 1995|volume=17 |issue=21 }}</ref>

In late 1868, Ducasse published (anonymously and at his own expense) the first canto of ''Les Chants de Maldoror'' (Chant premier, par ***), a booklet of thirty-two pages.

On 10 November 1868, Ducasse sent a letter to the writer [[Victor Hugo]], in which he included two copies of the first canto, and asked for a recommendation for further publication. A new edition of the first canto appeared at the end of January 1869, in the anthology ''Parfums de l'Âme'' in Bordeaux. Here Ducasse used his pseudonym "Comte de Lautréamont" for the first time. His chosen name may have been based on{{citation needed|date=December 2021}} the title character of [[Eugène Sue]]'s popular 1837 [[gothic novel]] ''{{interlanguage link multi|Latréaumont|fr|Latréaumont (roman)}}'', a haughty and blasphemous antihero similar in some ways to Isidore's Maldoror. The pseudonym was possibly paraphrasing {{lang|fr|l'autre à Mont(evideo)}},<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.gerhard-richter.com/fr/exhibitions/l-39autre-a-montevideo-homenaje-a-isidore-ducasse-1076/portrait-of-lautreacuteamont-13882/?p=1|title=Portrait de Lautréamont » L|website=www.gerhard-richter.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://ofazedordeauroras.blogspot.com/2015/03/lautre-mont-lautreamont-em-montevideo.html|title=O Fazedor de Auroras: L'autre à Mont (Lautréamont em Montevideo)|date=March 14, 2015}}</ref> although it can also be interpreted as ''l'autre Amon'' (the other [[Amon (demon)|Amon]]) or "l'autre Amont" (the other side of the river: 'En amont' = French for: 'Upstream') or, finally, from  ''[[The Count of Monte Cristo]]'', "L'autre Mond" (the other world's count).{{Citation needed|date=February 2007}}  Lefrère considers another possibility: le Comte de Lautréamont = le compte de l'autre à Mont (the account of the other at Montevideo); this could be interpreted as a joke at his father's expense, who supported Ducasse with a generous allowance.

Thanks to his father's money and the banker Darasse's good offices, a total of six cantos were to be published during late 1869, by [[Albert Lacroix]] in Brussels, who had also published Eugène Sue. The book was already printed when Lacroix refused to distribute it to the booksellers as he feared prosecution for [[blasphemy]] or [[obscenity]]. Ducasse considered that this was because "life in it is painted in too harsh colors" (letter to the banker Darasse from 12 March 1870).

Ducasse urgently asked [[Auguste Poulet-Malassis]], who had published [[Charles Baudelaire|Baudelaire]]'s ''[[Les Fleurs du mal]]'' (''The Flowers of Evil'') in 1857, to send copies of his book to the critics. They alone could judge "the commencement of a publication which will see its end only later, and after I will have seen mine". He tried to explain his position, and even offered to change some "too strong" points for future editions:

{{blockquote|text=I have written of evil as Mickiewicz, Byron, Milton, Southey, A. de Musset, Baudelaire and others have all done. Naturally I pulled the registers in a slightly exaggerated way, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire the good as the remedy. Thus it is always, after all, the good which is the subject, only the method is more philosophical and less naive than that of the old school. (...) Is that evil? No, certainly not.|sign=letter from 23 October 1869.}}

Poulet-Malassis announced the forthcoming publication of the book the same month in his literary magazine ''Quarterly Review of Publications Banned in France and Printed Abroad''. Otherwise, few people took heed of the book. Only the ''Bulletin du Bibliophile et du Bibliothécaire'' noticed it in May 1870, saying: "The book will probably find a place under the bibliographic curiosities".