[MOREL, Jean.] [Drop-head title:] De Nuptiis D. Eustachii de Refuge in supremo Senatu Consiliarii Regii & D. Helenae de Bellievre.

A Wedding for the Court Elite

[MOREL, Jean.] [Drop-head title:] De Nuptiis D. Eustachii de Refuge in supremo Senatu Consiliarii Regii & D. Helenae de Bellievre. [Paris: Philippe Du Pré. 1595.]

4to. Nineteenth-century morocco, flat spine richly gilt, board-edges and turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt; pp. 6, [2 (blank)] woodcut headpiece to p. 1 signed ‘Denis du Pre’ and with central roundel incorporating his device with the motto ‘Odiosa veritas’; a few scuffs to boards, spine and corners rubbed; uniform light toning; else very well preserved.

First edition, seemingly institutionally unrecorded, of this neo-Latin epithalamium by Jean Morel, head of the University of Paris’s Collège de Reims, composed on the occasion of the 1595 wedding of Hélène de Bellièvre and the statesman Eustache de Refuge, author of a best-selling Machiavellian guide for courtiers.

Hélène de Bellièvre (b. 1572/73) was one of nine daughters of Pomponne de Bellièvre, Chancellor of France; he had undertaken more than a dozen diplomatic missions for Henry III of France and in 1586 had been sent to London to persuade Elizabeth I not to execute Mary, Queen of Scots. She had married Claude Prévost, Master of Requests, in 1586, and remarried Eustache de Refuge, Prévost’s first cousin on his father’s side, five years after her first husband’s death in 1590.

De Refuge (1564–1617) was ambassador to the Low Countries and the Swiss Cantons and served in the Parlement of Paris.
He is perhaps best known for his bestselling treatise for courtiers, Traicté de la cour, ou instruction des courtisans, first printed anonymously in 1616 and translated into Italian as Trattato della corte (1621), into English as A Treatise of the Court or Instructions for Courtiers (1622) and as Arcana Aulica: or Walsingham’s Manual (1652, second part only), into Latin as Aulicus inculpatus (1644), and into German as Mr. du Refuge Kluger Hofmann (1654). Here, Morel (1539–1633) draws heavily on classical mythology before making reference to the prowess of the bride’s father and wishing the happy couple a quarrel-free lifetime of joy (as well as many children and grandchildren). The poet was known for his 1580 pedagogical textbook Scholae rhemensis rhetorica, a foundational text for the teaching of classical oratory.

Morel’s epithalamium to Bellièvre and Refuge later appeared as Ode XVII in his 1608 Lyra
(pp. 157–162), followed by another poem celebrating the 1596 wedding of Refuge’s sister Anne to Timoléon de Grangier, seigneur de Liverdis. The woodcut headpiece is signed by Denis (or Denys) du Pré, with his ‘Odiosa veritas’ device; he was successor to the printer of scientific and mathematical texts Mathieu David, and it seems that this work was printed at the very end of his career.

No copies traced on CCfr, OCLC, KvK, or Library Hub.

Catalogus librorum doctoris D. Joach. Gómez de la Cortina, March. De Morante, qui in aedibus suis exstant: V–Z. Supplementum A–B (1859), pp. 95–96; Catalogue des livres anciens et modernes composant la bibliothèque de feu M. Ed. Sénemaud (1888) 965 (possibly this copy). See BaTyR 27368; Renouard, pp. 115–16. Not in Adams, BP16, USTC, Brunet, or Pettegree & Walsby.

SKU: 2125132