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Jean Mauclère

Sous le ciel pâle de Lithuanie

The Author and the Book

Jean Mauclère (1887‑1951) was a journalist and writer whose output was prolific and varied: tales and short stories, children's literature, seafaring accounts, books on folklore, history, geography, and a few scholarly articles. A conservative Catholic traditionalist of that stripe peculiar to France between World Wars I and II, he knew how, as a good journalist, to gain access to the world of academia and politics, and so we see him leave for Lithuania in 1925, carefully guided by highly informed contacts who for six weeks squired him thru the main cities, regions and beauties of the country, including Vilnius which at the time was under Polish occupation. For his part, he seems to have set himself the mission of creating or deepening cultural relations between France and Lithuania: he was listened to, sometimes even at the highest levels of government.

Back in France, he wrote the book you have before you, for which (and several other books subsequently written on the history and literature of Lithuania) he was honored by the Lithuanian government with the rank of Grand Officer of the Order of Grand Duke Gediminas: quite understandable given his ardent support of Lithuanian independence and his strongly and clearly expressed sympathy for this country, secularly oppressed by the Russians who had made it a fief of their empire; a country then ravaged during the First World War by both Germans and Russians.

Much less understandably by my lights, the work was awarded one of the 38 Montyon Prizes given out by the Académie française in 1927: setting aside his often overblown and precious style — I would not want to write like him — the antisemitism he displays in various places in his book is downright repulsive. That said, Sous le ciel pâle de Lithuanie succeeds in giving us a feeling for what Lithuania was like in that time: the beauty of its landscapes, cities, and monuments, but also the problems the country was facing, and its first successes in modernization and independence.

The cover of the book quite properly credits the vignettes "by K. Simonis" (at the head of chapters II thru XXV of the Souvenirs de voyage section). This is most likely Kazys Šimonis (1887‑1978), an artist known mostly for his expressionist and surrealist interpretations of folk themes, chiefly decorative in nature, that made him one of the leading Lithuanian artists of the 20th century: his work is briefly discussed by Mauclère in chapter VI.

For technical details on how this site is laid out, see below, following the Table of Contents.

Technical Details

Edition and Copyright

The text on this site is my transcription of Jean Mauclère's book, published in Paris by Plon in 1926. The author died in 1951; his works have therefore been in the public domain since January 1, 2022.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition was very well proofread, but I still found a few errors: they are all trivial, however — garden-variety typos — and I've corrected them thruout with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed.

The occasional inconsistency in punctuation has been corrected to the author's usual style, in a slightly different color — barely noticeable on the page, but it shows up in the sourcecode as <SPAN CLASS="emend">. Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any ovelooked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have the printed edition in front of you.

Images

The book is illustrated with 43 photographs and 24 decorative vignettes, all black-and‑white, plus two color maps of ancient Lithuania in the time of Vytautas the Great, and of Lithuania in 1926.

I colorized the photos to the green of the Lithuanian flag. For Šimonis's vignettes, on the other hand, I took the liberty of colorizing them to my taste, although my palette was partly inspired by the works of his I saw online: these are nevertheless merely my interpretations of what the artist surely intended to be seen in black and white; may his shade not hold it against me.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57 these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

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The icon I use to indicate this book is an adaptation of the the vignette in chapter 16, colorized to the colors of the Lithuanian flag.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

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