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Last updated 6/10/2026

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'Pèlerinages en Espagne by Andre Corthis (a pseudonym of Andrée Magdeleine Husson) was published by Fasquelle editeurs in Paris in 1930. It contains a visit to Zaragoza in which the author met Don Miguel Unamuno.

The work was translated into Spanish by Jacinto Ramos and published under the title 'Peregrinaciones por Espana' in 1931.

The translation is mentioned in Gershon Legman's 'Bibliography of Paperfolding' which was published in 1952.

I am grateful to Michel Grand for locating the text of this work, which can be viewed in full online here.

The text relating to Don Miguel was previously published in the author's article 'Avec Miguel de Unamuno a Salamanque' in the 1st May 1924 issue of the French periodical 'Revue des Deux Mondes'.

Roughly translated the relevant passages say:

Pages 95 and 96

'At the edge of the inkwell was perched a vulture of white paper, a "folding" made like those cocottes and small boats which children have fun with, but with what complicated science, what delicate perfection, the collar tucked in, the sad beak, swelling its wings and posing solidly on his claws. Don Miguel showed it to me with pride. That one, he says, I invented it. He explained to me that folding was his mania, his passionate entertainment. In the pulpit itself, during classes, his fingers do not cease to make some paper object or some small animal. And he calls it so strangely – Cocotology.

Under the amusing appearance of a childish and delicate toy, was it a symbol, this melancholic white bird, perched on the inkwell? I asked myself this when I reread, in the collection of the lyrical sonnets, the poem called "To my vulture.'

Page 102

'During that afternoon when one could hear nothing but the sound of the bells, while the little vulture in white paper was gilded at the edge of the inkwell, all penetrated by reflections, I asked Don Miguel, whose work I knew only very imperfectly, which of his books he preferred.'

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