Memoires de Hollande

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 Netherlands around the mid-seventeenth century; it is one of the few novels daring to confront reality as it is, and the work deserves to be distinguished in the invention of French romantic literature on this account. The book is of interest for the history and topography of the Netherlands. It should be noted that this work was found in the greatest amateur libraries of the nineteenth century. (Lignerolles, Rochebilière, Rothschild, Téchener, etc.)