A Widow’s Unused Sheets
DESHOULIÈRES, Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde. Poësies. Paris: Jean Villette. 1691.
8vo in 4s. Eighteenth-century speckled calf, edges speckled red and green, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, board-edges roll-tooled in gilt; Villette’s woodcut monogram device to title, woodcut and typographic headpieces; upper hinge cracked, small abrasions and short splits to joints subtly restored, sporadic light foxing, slight dust-soiling at foot of last 2 ff.; cancelled 1773 ownership inscription ‘de la bibliothèque de Philippe-René ?Prevel’ to front free endpaper, late eighteenth-century ownership inscriptions ‘Ex libris Brelay’ to title and p. 220, Brelay’s printed ownership slip pasted to title (see below); a very good copy.
Extremely rare reissue reusing the sheets of the first edition of 1688 – printed by Françoise Loir, widow of the printer Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy – of the poems of Antoinette Deshoulières (c. 1634-1694), published to coincide with the reading of Deshoulières’s work at the Académie française in the spring of 1691, our copy owned by a resident of Niort during the French Revolution.
Voltaire called Deshoulières the most successful of French female poets, as ‘her verses have been the most widely remembered’ (quoted in Nouvelle biographie universelle XIII, col. 828, trans.). She was named a member of the Paduan Accademia degli Ricovrati and of the Academy of Aries, and in 1688 she received a pension of 2000 livres from Louis XIV. Although she was unable to join the Académie française due to her sex, her poems were recited as part of the official proceedings for the election of Bernard de Fontenelle in 1691. Our copy, with a cancel title (although retaining Loir’s 1687 privilège du roi), was evidently issued by Villette to capitalise on this event.
Villette bought much of Cramoisy’s unsold stock from Loir in 1691 and would eventually publish his own ‘second edition’ in 1693, after the publication rights had been ceded to him. Pasted to the title-page is a Revolutionary-era printed ownership slip, ‘661 au cit[oyen] Brelay, rue de la Liberté, a Niort. Deux-Sèvres’, the egalitarian designation citoyen was popularised following the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and was used as a universal form of address during the Revolution.
OCLC finds only two copies in the US (Cornell, Minneapolis) and none in the UK; not in Library Hub. CCfr records three copies only.
Tchemerzine II, p. 807. For the 1688 Cramoisy edition, see BM STC French F-170; Brunet II, col. 626; Cioranescu II, pp. 738-39; Gay III, p. 17; Graesse II, p. 368; USTC 6129821.
SKU: 2124634