Voyages du chevalier Chardin en Perse, et autres lieux de l'Orient (…) Nouvelle édition, soigneusement conférée sur les trois éditions originales, augmentée d'une Notice de la Perse, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à ce jour, de Notes, etc. par L. Langlès

Generally regarded as the most complete early edition of Chardin’s Travels, this imposing publication in ten volumes with a separate atlas was prepared in 1811 by Louis-Mathieu Langlès. The orientalist added a historical survey of Persia from the earliest times and an extensive critical apparatus, confronting Chardin’s text with the historical, geographical and philological scholarship of his own day. It remained the standard edition until Philip Stewart’s complete modernised and annotated text appeared in 2018.

The ten text volumes are bound in contemporary full tree calf, smooth spines richly decorated with gilt ornamental rolls and tools, black morocco-grained calf lettering- and numbering-pieces, gilt rolls at the headcaps, partly faded, gilt borders to the boards, marbled endpapers and marbled edges.

The atlas, bound separately as customary for its folio format, is preserved in contemporary half tan calf over marbled paper boards, smooth spine decorated with gilt rolls and tools, brown lettering-piece and red morocco title label to the front board, marbled edges. Some rubbing and restoration to the spine.

The first text volume presents several printing peculiarities: the pagination jumps from 235 to 256 without loss, while pages 213-220 are bound out of sequence. All the illustrations in the atlas, including the portrait and map, were subsequently renumbered from 1 to 65 in blue ink through a stencil. Some foxing to the plates.

The atlas comprises a portrait of Chardin, a large folding map and 83 views and figures on 63 plates, numbered [1]-82, with a plate 81 bis and several errors in numbering; nine are large folding plates and most of the figures occupy a full page. The frontispiece portrait was engraved by Jean-César Macret after a drawing by Charles-François-Adrien Macret. An attractive copy in handsome contemporary bindings, the atlas bound differently from the text volumes, as is customary for its larger format.

The son of a Huguenot jeweller established on the Place Dauphine, Jean Chardin left Paris in 1664 on the first of the journeys that were to take him through Persia and India. He gained access to the Safavid court, where Shah Abbas II appointed him a royal merchant and commissioned jewellery from him. Returning to France in 1670, he set out again the following year and reached Isfahan in 1673, accompanied by the draughtsman Guillaume-Joseph Grelot.

His long residence, command of Persian and access to the court enabled him to move far beyond the conventional travel narrative and produce an encyclopaedic account of Safavid Persia, its government, religion, sciences, arts and daily life.

Chardin returned to Europe at a time of increasing hostility towards French Protestants and settled in England in 1681. He was knighted by Charles II and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society the following year. He subsequently devoted much of his life to arranging the vast body of material gathered during his travels and years of residence in Persia.

This prolonged process of composition accounts for the exceptionally complex publishing history of the Travels. A first part appeared in London in 1686, but it was not until the Amsterdam edition of 1711 that the greater part of the work was brought together. Anxious to sell the book in Roman Catholic countries, the publisher Jean-Louis de Lorme had nevertheless removed a number of passages, particularly those in which Chardin’s Calvinism was most openly expressed. Prosper Marchand restored them, together with further manuscript material and The Coronation of Soliman III, in his edition of 1735, the first complete edition of Chardin’s published writings.

Almost a century later, Louis-Mathieu Langlès returned to this textual tradition and subjected it to the new methods of institutional Oriental scholarship. Founder and first director of the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes and curator of Oriental manuscripts at the Imperial Library, he collated the three principal early editions, retained the passages restored in 1735 and supplemented the whole with a history of Persia, critical notes and an index. His often severe annotations correct Chardin’s geographical, historical and etymological inaccuracies without diminishing the exceptional value of his testimony.

The illustrations provide an essential visual counterpart to this scholarly undertaking. Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, who accompanied Chardin during part of his second journey, recorded palaces, mosques, squares, gardens, monuments, inscriptions, costumes and ceremonies. Gathered here in a large-format atlas rather than dispersed and repeatedly folded through the text volumes, the plates retain their full documentary impact; a substantial proportion is devoted to Isfahan and Persepolis. Langlès added a new portrait of the author and a large folding map.

From Chardin’s direct experience of Safavid Persia to its recasting by the institutional Orientalism of the early nineteenth century, this edition embodies almost a century and a half of transmission and scholarship. A handsome and complete contemporary-bound copy of the standard early edition of the Travels, accompanied by its remarkable atlas of plans, views and figures.