Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne LA FAYETTE

New edition illustrated with a frontispiece engraving in each volume.
Bindings in half bottle-green Russia morocco, spines with five fine raised bands decorated with typographical motifs and gilt friezes showing slight rubbing, apple-green cardboard boards, marbled paper endpapers and pastedowns, marbled edges, contemporary bindings.
Foxing, two spines faded.

Fourth edition revised from the first edition for the first volume, first edition for the second refuting the thesis that this novel is by Madame de La Fayette.
Handsome copy.
Full green morocco binding, spine with five raised bands set with gilt dots and decorated with double gilt compartments richly decorated, date and place gilt at center of spine, gilt roulettes on headcaps, frame of triple gilt fillets on boards, small black spots on first board, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, frame of gilt dentelle on pastedowns, lower corners very slightly bumped, double gilt fillets on leading edges, very elegant binding signed by Hardy.
Our copy is complete, as frontispiece, with...

Second edition, after the posthumous first edition of 1731.
Nineteenth-century full blonde calf binding, spine with five raised bands decorated with gilt fillets, roulettes and fleurons, as well as black fillets, brown morocco title label, gilt date at foot, double gilt fillet framing the boards, gilt roulette on the edges, fine gilt dentelle framing the pastedowns, top edge gilt retaining deckled edges. Binding signed Muller successeur de Thouvenin.
One corner very slightly bumped and joints skillfully restored.
Handsome copy of these Memoirs of which we know, even today, only fragments.

First edition, illustrated with a frontispiece by Bernard Picart, engraved by Buisson. Title page in red and black.
Full red morocco binding from the late 19th century. Spine decorated with 5 small fleurons. Gilt title. Interior roll. Top edge gilt. Very fine condition.
As announced in the preface, Madame de La Fayette wrote memoirs from her youth, but the manuscripts were lost, and only these few extracts remain. These historical memoirs, quite classical in execution, deal with the internal and external affairs of the kingdom of France; the style is lively, incisive, mixing more intimate chronicles and great affairs of the kingdom.

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...

New edition after the first, very rare, published in 1670. Huet's Treatise on the Origin of Novels, in the form of a letter to Segrais, appears at the end of the first part of Zaïde.

Armorial copy of Charlotte Emilie Le Fèvre de Caumartin de La cour de Balleroy, daughter of Louis-François Le Fèvre de Caumartin, lord of Boissy, and wife of the Marquis de la Cour de Balleroy. Feminine arms are rare and sought after, as few women formed libraries with their coat of arms. The Marquise de Balleroy, who died in 1749, settled in Normandy, and maintained an intense correspondence with the highest nobility from which she descended.

Full speckled...