COSWAY-STYLE BINDING S‚vign‚, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Puliga, Henrietta Consuelo de, Comtesse Bayntun Madame de S‚vign‚, Her Correspondents and Contemporaries 1873
A Special Extra-Illustrated Copy,in a Fine Early Cosway-Style Binding by Bayntun of Bathwith Miniature Portraits on Ivory of Madame de S‚vign‚ and Her Daughter, Madame Grignan[COSWAY-STYLE BINDING]. [SVIGN, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de]. PULIGA, Henrietta Consuelo de, Comtesse. Madame de S‚vign‚, Her Correspondents and Contemporaries. By the Comtesse de Puliga. Special Copy Extra Illustrated. In Two Volumes. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1873.First edition. Two octavo volumes (8 3/8 x 5 3/16 inches; 213 x 131 mm). xvi, 400; xii, 373, [1] pp. The original title-pages have been replaced with specially printed title-pages. Extra-illustrated with sixty-six plates (twenty-two of which are hand-colored), some inlaid to size.In a fine Cosway-style binding (ca. 1920) by Bayntun of Bath (stamp-signed in gilt on the front turn-in) of full dark blue crushed levant morocco over bevelled boards. Covers decoratively panelled in gilt in an Art Nouveau design within an outer gilt single fillet border, spines in six compartments with five raised bands, lettered in gilt in two compartments, decoratively panelled in gilt in the remaining four compartments, with Extra Illustrated 1873 in gilt at the foot, board edges with gilt-dotted rule, turn-ins ruled in gilt with gilt floral corner ornaments, dark red morocco doublures within an onlaid dark maroon morocco frame within single gilt fillets, dark red morocco liners, all edges gilt. The front doublure of each volume is set with a very fine oval portrait miniature on ivory under glass (each measuring 3 3/16 x 2 1/2 inches; 80 x 63 mm.), in Volume I of Madame de S‚vign‚ (signed Penin) and in Volume II of her daughter, Madame Grignan (signed Li‚). The miniatures are set within a frame of onlaid dark maroon morocco within an inner single gilt fillet and an outer double gilt fillet. A superb example.Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de S‚vign‚ (1626-1696), French writer noted for some 1,700 letters written to her daughter. The natural, spontaneous tone of the letters broke established rules for the genre and served as a new model. Of old Burgundian nobility, she was introduced into court society in Paris after her marriage in 1644 to Henri de S‚vign‚, a Breton gentleman of nobility who squandered most of her money before being killed in a duel in 1651. Mme de S‚vign‚ was left with two children, Fran‡oise Marguerite (b. 1646) and Charles (b. 1648). For some years she continued to frequent the fashionable social circles of Paris while also devoting herself to her children. In 1669 her daughter married Count de Grignan and then moved to Provence with him. The separation from her daughter provoked acute loneliness in S‚vign‚; it also prompted her to write the letters on which her reputation is based. Most of the letters, written without literary intention or ambition, were composed in the first seven years of their separation in 1671. The letters recount current news and events in fashionable society, describe prominent persons, comment on contemporary topics, and provide details of her life from day to day her household, her acquaintances, her visits, and her taste in reading. S‚vign‚ s conversational manner makes her stories of current events and gossip unforgettable (Merriam-Webster s Encyclopedia of Literature). The correspondence of Madame de S‚vign‚, covering almost fifty years of a rich and turbulent period in French history and culture (1648-1696), has been the favorite reading of great writers from Voltaire to Virginia Woolf. From the time of their first publication in 1726, S‚vign‚ s letters have provided a standard against which other important letter collections can be measured As a writer, S‚vign‚ occupies a special position in the history of French literature. She wrote nothing but letters, thousands of them, letters that constitute a treasure of information for historians and that have been admired as masterpieces of style. S‚vign‚ s body of work, though, has not been stable it has changed its shape at least once every few decades since the end of the seventeenth century. Since the letters were first written, they have been edited, corrected, copied, recopied, and even willfully destroyed by a long line of readers with a variety of motives. During S‚vign‚ s lifetime the letters were published only once, when her cousin Roger de Bussy-Rabutin included a few of them in a volume of his memoirs, which he presented to Louis XIV. After her death on 17 April 1696, a larger number of letters was included in the published correspondence of Bussy-Rabutin, generating enough public interest to persuade S‚vign‚ s granddaughter Pauline de Simiane to undertake the task of preparing her grandmother s letters for publication. This project resulted in the intermittent release of selected letters at intervals over the next hundred years and spawned enough family quarreling and tension between the copyists and de Simiane's descendants that in 1784 her son-in-law burned all of the several hundred letters she had left in his possession. When the literary scholar L.J.N. Monmerqu‚ undertook the first critical edition of S‚vign‚ s letters in 1818, there were already few original autographs left. He had to verify his material by comparing the many published editions of selected letters and the copies of letters that had been compiled by editors and never published. Since the first complete edition of the letters was published from 1862 to 1868 (Monmerqu‚ having spent more than thirty years on the project), there has been one major discovery of a 1720 manuscript copy of some of the letters and two new critical editions, the definitive one being Roger Duchˆne s edition of the correspondence published in three volumes from 1972 to 1978. Duchˆne s edition includes more than 1,500 letters by S‚vign‚ and more than 1,000 letters addressed to her, and it draws on all of the available copies of the letters as well as the relatively few autographs that remain in museums and archives across France (Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Marie de Rabutin Chantal, Madame de S‚vign‚ (1626-1696), in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 268: 17th Century French Writers (2002), pp. 351-359).
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