Oeuvres. Fables. Contes et nouvelles en vers. Oeuvres diverses. Théâtre.

Seven octavo volumes bringing together, in uniform contemporary bindings, the greater part of La Fontaine’s Works in the critical edition prepared by Charles-Athanase Walckenaer and published in Paris by Lefèvre in the early 1820s, with one important distinction: in place of the volume of Contes et nouvelles en vers originally intended for the set, an independent edition, abundantly illustrated after Eisen and published in Paris by the Libraires associés in 1791-1796, has been substituted.

Contemporary full brown calf, the Œuvres diverses and Théâtre volumes bound in a slightly lighter shade. Spines with raised bands, richly decorated with blind-tooled à la grotesque ornaments, the central tool incorporating monastic motifs and the others composed of sequences of small circles; gilt rolls on the bands, gilt fillets, and multiple gilt rolls at head and foot. Covers with a large central lozenge tooled in blind and heightened with dots and small rosettes, framed by a blind ornamental border and black fillets; gilt roll to board edges, green comb-marbled pastedowns and endpapers, all edges gilt. Unsigned Restoration bindings of notably high quality, stylistically comparable to the work of the leading Parisian workshops of the period, notably Thouvenin or Simier, though no attribution can be sustained.

A fresh and attractive set. A few light scattered spots of foxing, chiefly where the tissue guards have been in contact with the paper; small traces of dampstaining to the upper board of the second volume of the Contes.

Walckenaer’s edition normally comprised six volumes: two volumes of Fables, one of Contes et nouvelles, one of Théâtre, and two of Œuvres diverses. The Musée Médard preserves a set arranged in precisely this way. The individual parts appear to have been issued with a degree of independence, as shown by the dates ranging from 1821 to 1823 and, in the present set, by the absence of the general half-title “Œuvres complètes” from the Fables, although it appears in the Œuvres diverses and Théâtre.

The Lefèvre volumes were printed by Pierre Didot l’aîné. The Fables are illustrated with twelve plates after Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, newly engraved for this publication, notably by Schroeder. The Œuvres diverses and Théâtre continue the same illustrative programme, with compositions after Moreau interpreted by various engravers, including Simonet, Dupréel and Petit. The Musée Médard confirms this continuity of plates after Moreau throughout the different parts of Walckenaer’s edition.

This illustrative programme accompanies Walckenaer’s critical project, which went well beyond the simple reprinting of La Fontaine. His aim was to arrange the author’s works, annotate them and facilitate their reading. The title itself announces a “new edition, revised, arranged and accompanied by notes”. The set ranks among the major early nineteenth-century attempts to bring together and systematically comment upon La Fontaine’s works.

The first owner of the present set, however, appears to have deliberately altered this programme at one specific point: in place of Lefèvre’s volume of the Contes, he substituted two slightly smaller volumes published in Paris “chez les Libraires associés”, the first in 1791 and the second in 1796. Their incorporation into a uniformly bound contemporary set strongly suggests a deliberate bibliophilic choice: to retain Walckenaer for his critical apparatus and for the remainder of La Fontaine’s works, while providing the Contes with a far richer series of illustrations directly descended from Eisen’s celebrated cycle.

These two volumes contain a portrait of La Fontaine after Hyacinthe Rigaud and 80 unsigned full-page plates. Their iconography ultimately derives from the Fermiers généraux edition of 1762, one of the high points of eighteenth-century French book illustration, for which Charles Eisen designed the scenes accompanying the Contes. A first counterfeit edition reproduced these compositions in 1777; the Libraires associés edition copied them once again in reverse, though without reproducing the headpieces and tailpieces that contributed to the decorative richness of the original edition.

The relationship between the three editions is therefore less one of straightforward reprinting than of graphic transmission. Eisen’s designs of 1762, immediately associated with the libertine world of the Contes, passed from one edition to another and remained current at the end of the century, even as their publishing context had changed profoundly. The reversed copies preserve the movement, theatricality and taste for gallant scenes that had made the original cycle so successful.

The set thus brings together two distinct ways, separated by several decades, of presenting La Fontaine both textually and visually. Moreau le Jeune accompanies Walckenaer’s scholarly edition through an illustrative language rooted in the taste of the late eighteenth century and reinterpreted by engravers of the Restoration; Eisen, through successive counterfeit editions, preserves in the Contes a freer and more sensual iconography inseparable from their bibliophilic tradition.

A fine bibliophilic assemblage combining Walckenaer’s critical edition with the Contes illustrated by 80 compositions descended from Eisen: a set deliberately recomposed by a Restoration collector, who retained Lefèvre’s scholarly apparatus while restoring to the Contes the abundant libertine imagery that had shaped their eighteenth-century visual tradition.