Paris, Liège, Anne-Catherine Bassompierre, 1778.
5 volumes 8vo. Collated complete. Quarter red morocco, flat spines adorned lengthwise with gilt roulettes, crowned cipher at the head, green edges. Contemporary binding.
177 x 105 mm.
One of the models of Dangerous Liaisons bound at the time with the monogram of Maria Feodorovna (1759-1828), Grand Duchess, then Empress of Russia.
“Abbé Gérard (1737-1813) transposed into French aristocratic and Catholic society the problems of family psychology and morality that were the substance of Richardson’s and Rousseau’s novels; he added to these the problems of public life ” (H. Coulet, Le Roman jusqu’à la Révolution).
Le Comte de Valmont, a work by Canon Gérard (1737-1813), had a major success.
The personal wanderings in which the author had fallen before becoming a priest seem to have given him the idea for this excellent work which he first published in 3 volumes in-12, and which today has 5.
Le comte de Valmont had more than fifteen editions. The author “shows through a fiction the deviations of a young man driven by his passions and by pernicious societies, and establishes the proofs that sooner or later bring a straight mind and a virtuous heart back to religion ».
“In the realm of prose literature of the time, it was Abbé Philippe-Louis Gérard who best reconciled the world of duty and that of pleasure. The good abbé wrote an epistolary novel that would be reissued several times until the end of the century. The very title of the work, ‘The Count of Valmont, or The Wandering of Reason’, evoked that of Crébillon’s scandalously bawdy novel, ‘The Mistakes of the Heart and Spirit’; and we see retrospectively that Valmont, the hero of the novel, prefigured by his name and character, the essential protagonist of Laclos’s masterpiece. The abbé’s novel tells us of the redemption of a jaded aristocrat. He has regained faith in the only true religion thanks to a wife whose virtue is indisputable. This novel titillated Gérard’s readers thanks to a series of lengthy notes at the bottom of the letters. They are entitled ‘notes on adultery’, ‘on every irregular commitment’, ‘notes on places of debauchery’, ‘on gambling’… at the same time, the abbé had inserted edifying passages about ‘the love of God’, ‘the duties of fathers of families’ and ‘the dignity of man’. ” (Otis Fellows).
Philippe-Louis Gérard studied at the Louis the Great College under the Jesuits.
“After 1789, Abbé Gérard witnessed the excesses of the revolution, and suffered his share of the persecutions of those troubled times; he remained in prison for a long time. Freed, he went to spend the rest of his life in retirement, occupied with the cultivation of letters. »
The edition is adorned with an engraved frontispiece by Dieudonné Bassompierre and a vignette with the arms of Queen Marie-Antoinette.
Very beautiful copy with the monogram of Maria Feodorovna (1759-1828), Grand Duchess then Empress of Russia.
Born Princess Dorothea-Sophie-Augusta of Wurttemberg, niece of Frederick the Great, she married Paul, son of the great Catherine, in October 1776. He ascended the throne upon his mother’s death on November 17, 1796. His hatred of the French Revolution was such that he banned the import of any French book.
