Memoires de Monsieur le Cardinal de Retz

Very rare first edition of Cardinal de Retz’s Mémoires, published in three volumes in Nancy by Jean-Baptiste Cusson in 1717, under the imprint “A Amsterdam, & se trouve A Nancy”. Title-pages printed in red and black. Jean-Baptiste Cusson was at the time printer and bookseller to H.R.H. the Duke of Lorraine. Although substantially incomplete when compared with the manuscript as it is known today, this edition marks the first appearance in print of one of the great autobiographical and political works of seventeenth-century France.

Contemporary full brown calf, spines richly gilt, red morocco lettering-pieces and brown morocco volume labels. Upper headcap of volume II lacking; loss to the bottom compartment of volume I; wormholes to the boards of volume II; three corners worn. Small brown stain affecting two letters on leaf 89 of volume I. In volume II, two small marginal wormholes from p. 265 to the end, increasing to three on the final leaves, with a short wormtrack to the pastedown. In volume III, one marginal wormhole at p. 113, then two from p. 119; a small wormtrack to the lower right corner of pp. 215-238; five small marginal wormholes from p. 349 to the end. Despite these defects, the paper remains notably fresh throughout, an uncommon condition for this edition.

Provenance: Jean Bécarud (1925-2014), with his twentieth-century armorial bookplate. A political scientist and senior parliamentary official, Bécarud served from 1974 to 1991 as Director of the French Senate’s Library, Archives and Foreign Documentation Service, an especially appropriate provenance for the memoirs of a man who made institutions, intrigue and the exercise of power the very substance of his narrative.

Lorraine occupies a remarkable place in the history of the book. Nearly forty years before its publication in Nancy, it was in the same principality that Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, composed the greater part of his Mémoires. Retiring to the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Mihiel in June 1675 and also spending periods at his estate at Commercy, the former Coadjutor of Paris, then in his early sixties, began to reconstruct the most turbulent years of his life. André Bertière has placed the main period of composition between the autumn of 1675 and August 1676; parts of the manuscript were even copied out by monks of Saint-Mihiel.

The contrast is striking. Far from Paris, in the relative quiet of his Lorraine retreat, Retz recreates with extraordinary immediacy the days of the Fronde, the secret councils, reversals, improvised alliances and portraits of men whom he had successively opposed, supported and opposed again. Distance had done nothing to dull the instincts of the former man of action; rather, it allowed him to transform a lifetime of intrigue into an almost instinctive understanding of politics.

Retz was not, however, writing an impersonal history. From the outset the narrative assumes the form of a confidence addressed to an unnamed “Madame”. Her silent presence contributes greatly to the remarkable freedom of the Mémoires: Retz explains, justifies, judges and occasionally stages himself as though continuing an extended private conversation, while never abandoning his desire to transmit the political experience he had acquired.

The identity of this recipient has long been the subject of conjecture. From the nineteenth century onwards, and particularly following Champollion-Figeac’s 1859 edition, she was widely identified as Madame de Caumartin. André Bertière’s research substantially weakened this traditional attribution: evidence within the Mémoires, considered alongside contemporary correspondence, instead points towards Madame de Sévigné, now generally regarded as the most plausible candidate. Madame de Caumartin nevertheless played a genuine role in the manuscript’s history, since Retz showed her the completed text, a circumstance which probably helped give rise to the later tradition.

The work thus emerged through an unusual sequence of displacements. One of the principal Parisian actors of the Fronde became, at Saint-Mihiel, the historian of his own actions; a confession ostensibly intended for a chosen correspondent subsequently circulated in manuscript; and in 1717, thirty-eight years after Retz’s death, it returned to Lorraine for its first appearance in print. This first edition still presented an incomplete text, parts of the manuscript remaining suppressed or inaccessible, yet its rapid republication in 1718 already testifies to the force with which Retz’s voice entered the literary world.

The Fronde is here narrated by one of those most deeply involved in creating its disorder. That position gives the account both its authority and its partiality: Retz understands the mechanisms he describes because he had himself set many of them in motion. His portraits, his instinct for character, his understanding of interest and vanity, and the speed with which he recreates a decision or a reversal of allegiance make the Mémoires far more than a historical source for the early reign of Louis XIV. Political action itself becomes literary material, as Retz simultaneously constructs a history of the Fronde and the image of himself that he intended to leave to posterity.

A very rare copy of the 1717 first edition, the first appearance in print of Retz’s Mémoires, whose publishing history remarkably brings back to Nancy a work largely composed during his Lorraine retreat at Saint-Mihiel: the testimony of a principal actor in the Fronde who, far from Paris, became the memorialist of his own intrigues.