Oeuvres complettes de Marivaux

First complete collected edition, published in Paris in 1781 in twelve volumes. For the first time, it brings together in a single set Marivaux’s plays, novels, periodical writings, and a number of prose works previously scattered across separate publications. Portrait of Marivaux as frontispiece, painted by Pougin de Saint-Aubin, within an ornamental frame designed by Clément-Pierre Marillier and engraved by François-Robert Ingouf, known as Ingouf le Jeune.

Uniform contemporary full mottled tan calf. Spines with raised bands, gilt compartments and rolls at foot; tan morocco lettering- and numbering-pieces; triple gilt fillet borders to the boards. Some localised restoration and wear to headcaps and joints, rubbing and a few worn corners; in volume I, the tissue guard has caused browning to the facing title-page and the following leaf. Despite these signs of use, the set remains harmonious, the paper generally fresh, with only a few somewhat browned gatherings.

Until then, collected editions had chiefly enshrined Marivaux the dramatist; in 1781, these twelve volumes at last restore the writer in his full range, bringing together with the plays his novels, periodical writings, and prose works previously scattered across separate publications. Alongside the thirty-two plays appear Les Effets surprenants de la sympathie, Le Spectateur françois, L’Indigent philosophe, Le Cabinet du philosophe, Homère travesti, Le Don Quichotte moderne, L’Éducation d’un prince, Le Miroir, La Voiture embourbée, and Le Télémaque travesti; behind the author of the comedies of feeling, the novelist, moralist, and observer of manners and vanity comes back into view.

Published eighteen years after Marivaux’s death, the collection also belongs to the moment when he was first being firmly established among the classics of the century. The frontispiece portrait no longer merely supplies a likeness of the author of the best-known plays; it now opens onto an oeuvre gathered, ordered, and presented in all its diversity. Tchemerzine further notes that Duviquet’s edition of 1825-1830 did not reproduce the entire contents of this 1781 collection.

By the end of the 18th century, as Marivaux’s name was already beginning to settle around his theatre and around the notion of “marivaudage” that would eventually reduce his legacy too narrowly, these twelve volumes preserve a much broader image of the writer: not only a dramatist, but also an author of fiction, moral prose, and social observation, whose work cannot be confined to his comedies alone.