Oeuvres complètes

First collected edition, partly first edition, of the works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, published in Paris by Méquignon-Marvis in 1818, four years after the author’s death. Twelve octavo volumes, printed by L.-T. Cellot.

The illustration comprises a frontispiece portrait of Bernardin, drawn by Girodet-Trioson and engraved by Frédéric Lignon, together with 26 hors-texte plates after Girodet, Desenne, Lafitte, Moreau le Jeune, Prud’hon, Vernet and Isabey; these include a folding map of the Atlantic hemisphere and several botanical plates. As is often the case with this edition, the engravings have been bound in a somewhat irregular order, several suites having their own numbering; the set is nevertheless complete.

Contemporary Bradel-style bindings in red half Russia leather, smooth spines ruled in gilt, boards covered with paper imitating Russia leather, green paper endleaves. Untrimmed. Scattered foxing and some soiling to a few boards. A handsome, uniformly bound set, the bindings well preserved.

By 1818, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was already far more than simply the author of Paul and Virginia: around the novel that had made his reputation were now gathered his travel writings, the Études de la nature, the Harmonies, political texts, essays, fragments and several works that had remained in manuscript. Across twelve volumes, Aimé-Martin thus presented an oeuvre far broader than the one preserved in the public imagination by the success of the novel.

Paul and Virginia nevertheless remains at the heart of the collection. Aimé-Martin follows “la belle édition in-4° publiée par l’auteur en 1806,” while reusing several compositions originally devised for the illustrated editions of 1789 and 1806. Around this already celebrated text, however, he adds the Harmonies de la nature, first published posthumously in 1815, together with a body of manuscript material brought into this large collected edition for the first time.

At the beginning of the final volume, Bernardin returns to one of the decisive encounters of his life: “Au mois de juin de 1772, un ami m’ayant proposé de me mener chez J.-J. Rousseau, il me conduisit dans une maison rue Plâtrière”. The Essai sur J.-J. Rousseau thus opens a sequence in which education, Socrates, the Jardin des Plantes and several of Bernardin’s scientific projects soon follow; as the volume progresses, the author of Paul and Virginia gives way to a much broader figure - moralist, traveller, observer of nature and man of projects.

These twelve volumes thus bring Bernardin de Saint-Pierre out from the shadow of his own masterpiece: around Paul and Virginia finally unfold the voyages, nature, Rousseau, the manuscripts and projects of a writer whom the nineteenth century could now read in the full breadth of his work.