Histoire novvelle et cvrieuse des royaumes de Tvnqvin et de Lao. Contenant vne description exacte de leur Origine, Grandeur & Estenduë ; de leurs Richesses, & de leurs Forces ; des Mœurs, & du naturel de leurs Habitans ; de la fertilité de ces contrées, & des Riuieres qui les arrosent de tous costez, & de plusieurs autres circonstances vtiles & necessaires pour vne plus grande intelligence de la Géographie. Ensemble la Magnificence de la Cour des Roys de Tunquin, & des Ceremonies qu'on obserue à leurs Enterremens. Traduite de l'Italien…. 

Paris, Gervais Clouzier, 1666. Quarto, 5 unnumbered leaves and 436 pages.

First edition in French, translated by the Celestine Father François-Célestin Le Comte from Giovanni Filippo de Marini's account, originally published in Rome in 1663 as Delle missioni de' padri della Compagnia di Giesù nella provincia del Giappone, e particolarmente di quella di Tumkino. The translation appeared with two variant title pages, Relation nouvelle et curieuse and Histoire nouvelle et curieuse des royaumes de Tunquin et de Lao, the present copy bearing the latter. Cordier, Bibliotheca Indosinica, 1046; Streit, Bibliotheca Missionum, V, 1719; Sommervogel, V, 583.

Contemporary full mottled brown calf, spine with five raised bands framed by gilt rolls and decorated with gilt floral tools in double compartments, sprinkled edges. Spine skilfully renewed.

Pages 181-184 are repeated, and the pagination advances from 284 to 289 without any loss of text. The first part, pages 1-327, contains the Relation nouvelle et curieuse du royaume de Tunquin; the second, beginning on page 329, is devoted to the kingdom of Laos.

An important copy with the contemporary manuscript ownership inscription of the Professed House of the Jesuits in Paris at the head of the title page.

Born at Taggia in the Republic of Genoa in 1608, Giovanni Filippo de Marini entered the Society of Jesus in 1625 and was ordained in 1637. He sailed from Lisbon on 26 March 1640. After reaching Goa, an attack by Dutch ships and prolonged stops at Malacca and in Siam delayed his progress towards East Asia. He arrived at Macao in 1643 and reached Tonkin towards the end of 1646. He remained there as a missionary for almost twelve years, until his expulsion by Trịnh Tạc in July 1658.

Following a brief term as rector of St Paul's College in Macao, Marini was sent to Europe as procurator of the mission and representative of the Jesuit Province of Japan at the Society's Eleventh General Congregation. During this stay he assembled his own observations and information supplied by fellow missionaries into the five books of the Delle missioni, published in Rome in 1663. The first three books concern Tonkin, the fourth Cochinchina, Cambodia, Siam, Makassar, Canton and Hainan, and the fifth is entirely devoted to Laos.

Marini sailed again from Lisbon in 1666 with a new group of missionaries. In 1671 the King of Portugal nominated him Bishop of Macao, but the appointment was never confirmed by the Holy See and Marini was not consecrated. He returned to Tonkin that year, finding a missionary landscape transformed by the rivalry between Jesuits working under Portuguese patronage and the apostolic vicars of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. Arrested in March 1673, he was finally expelled in September. He later settled at Macao, became Visitor of China and Japan in 1680 and retained that office until his death on 17 July 1682.

The first part remains one of the major Jesuit accounts of seventeenth-century Tonkin. Marini describes the kingdom's geography, natural resources and rivers, as well as its political organisation, the splendour of the court, the customs of its inhabitants and the funeral ceremonies of its rulers. His perspective is that of a European missionary and reflects the religious assumptions of his age, yet his long residence enabled him to transmit direct observations of the society in which he worked. Alongside the accounts of Cristoforo Borri, Alexandre de Rhodes and Joseph Tissanier, his book made an important contribution to European knowledge of the Indochinese peninsula.

The account of Laos has a different documentary character. Marini does not appear to have visited the kingdom himself and relied largely upon reports from fellow Jesuits, particularly information deriving from Giovanni Maria Leria's mission at Vientiane. He nevertheless supplied French readers with one of the earliest substantial descriptions of Laos, discussing its territory, resources and military strength, the character attributed to its inhabitants, its court and its government. Its second-hand nature does not diminish the pioneering importance of a text devoted to a region then almost absent from European geographical literature.

The provenance of the Professed House gives the present copy particular coherence. Established in the rue Saint-Antoine, the house was one of the Society's principal spiritual and intellectual centres in Paris. Its library, later enriched by the collections of Pierre-Daniel Huet, Gilles Ménage and Father Tournemine, contained approximately 30,000 volumes by 1754. The library did not ordinarily use an ownership stamp, and its books are frequently identified, as here, by a manuscript inscription on the title page. Following the suppression of the Society in France, the collections were inventoried and largely dispersed in 1763.

A rare first edition in French, preserved in its contemporary binding and bearing the provenance of the Professed House of the Jesuits in Paris. Founded upon Marini's direct experience of Tonkin and upon information gathered through the missionary network for Laos, the book carried knowledge assembled at the farthest reaches of Asia into the heart of the Society's Parisian library.