Pierre-Daniel HUET

Third edition, the second issued under this title, partly original as it includes several new memoirs and the general tariff of Holland.

See Sabin 47557. Cioranescu 35613. Kress 3019. Not in Goldsmiths or Einaudi. See INED 2306 for the "Grand trésor historique et politique du florissant commerce des Hollandois" (1712).

Amsterdam, Du Villard, Changuion, 1718, 8vo,

Full mottled tan calf, spine with raised bands decorated with gilt fillets, garlands and floral tools (partly faded), red morocco title label, gilt rolls at the head and tail, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, gilt fillet on board edges, red edges, one lower corner bumped, others slightly rubbed, contemporary binding.

 

The rare first edition, long attributed to Madame de La Fayette, and published the same year as La Princesse de Clèves, then to Courtilz de Sandras and even to Pierre Daniel Huet.
Late nineteenth-century full morocco binding signed Bellevallée glazed old red. Jansenist spine with raised bands. Wide gilt inner border. Date at foot. Very fine copy, perfectly established, with wide margins, and unwashed.
Unlike La Princesse de Clèves, or La Princesse de Montpensier, the Mémoires de Hollande is not a historical novella, but presents itself as a novel of manners that uses modern first names. The work describes, through the love affair between a Jewish woman and a Lusignan, life in the Netherlands around the mid-seventeenth century; it is one of the few novels daring to confront reality as it is, and the work deserves to be distinguished in the invention of French romantic literature on this account. The book is of interest for the history and topography of the Netherlands. It should be noted that this work was found in the greatest amateur libraries of the nineteenth century. (Lignerolles, Rochebilière, Rothschild, Téchener, etc.)

Statement of fourth edition.
Contemporary rigid vellum binding. Smooth spine. Red morocco title label.
Anthology of poems by Pierre Daniel Huet (1630-1721), historian, scholar and prolific writer, with a section of notes on the Greek epigrams used in the poems (the quotations are in Greek).