Les avantures du Baron de Fæneste. Comprinses en quatre Parties. Les trois premieres reveues, augmentees, & distinguees par Chapitres. Ensemble la quatriesme partie nouvellement mise en lumiere. Le tout par le mesme Autheur
Au Dezert [Geneva]: for the author, 1630. First complete collected edition.
Small octavo (6 ½” x 4 3/8”, 165mm x 111mm): 2 binder’s blanks, *6 A–T8 V2, 2 binder’s blanks [$4 signed; G4 signed “F4”]. 160 leaves, pp. [12] (title, blank, 3pp. preface, 7pp. table of contents) 1–308.
Sumptuously bound by Trautz-Bauzonnet in full contemporary green morocco. On the spine, 5 raised bands. Title gilt to the second panel, city and date gilt to the third. With gilt fleurons to the boards, gilt dentelles, marbled endpapers, and a red silk marking ribbon. All edges of the text-block gilt, with concealed marbling to the fore-edge.
Paper flaw to the fore-edge of H3. Bookplate of Henri Burton to the front pastedown.
The Avantures du Baron Faeneste first appeared as two parts in 1617, the third was published in 1619, and the fourth, for the first time here, in 1630. A burlesque comedy, the work is presented "as a dialogue between two characters interspersed with various accounts. According to a tradition of the comic story, the two speakers form a pair constituted around a major opposition between the principle of true being (the honest squire Éné) and outward appearance (the Gascon Baron Faeneste) on which are grafted correlative oppositions: Catholic (Faeneste) against Huguenot (Éné), courtier against provincial, and so on. Within this series of oppositions revolve various forms of satire: social, political, and religious, which are volleyed against — in Aubigné’s perspective — the evil that plagued French society in the years between 1610 and 1630. Theodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630) was a renowned Huguenot and served on the battlefield and in the council chamber throughout the Wars of Religion. Previously a close advisor to Henry IV, he withdrew from public life following the King’s controversial conversion to Catholicism and spent the remainder of his days writing (often scathing) prose and poetry regarding the matter at his home in Poitou and, later, Geneva, where he died the year the fourth installation of Avantures du Baron Faeneste was published. The series is heralded as a complex work, with its themes spanning all facets of societal discontent and its languages being equally varied (the text combines the Gascon dialect, patois of Saintonge, Poitou, and Picardy). Biting and clever, Avantures du Baron Faeneste is a cornerstone of French burlesque literature.
From the distinguished library of the late Henri Burton. A Lyon native who later moved to Geneva, Burton collected over four decades, beginning with strong buying in the landmark sales of the 1930s which dispersed the private stock of Edouard Rahir. Represented and advised for much of his collecting by Lardanchet, Burton quietly formed a collection “with great taste and discretion.” The present example was lot 46 in the sale of his library on 11 June 2013 at Sotheby’s New York.
Tchemerzine I, 175.
Cataloged by G.R. Murdock
Item #GRM0106
Price: $2,000