Les Oeuvres de Monsieur de Molière

First complete collected edition and first illustrated edition. The first edition of Dom Garcie de Navarre, L’Impromptu de Versailles, Dom Juan ou le Festin de Pierre, Les Amans magnifiques, and La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas. With thirty copper engraved illustrations by Jean Sauvé after Pierre Brassart, 9 of them included in the pagination.19th-century red full morocco binding, spines with five raised bands, date gilt at foot, double gilt fillets to edges of covers and spine-ends, large inner gilt dentelle, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. Bindings signed M. Lortic.

An exceptional copy of the famous 1682 edition housed in a very elegant binding by Marcelin Lortic, who succeeded his father Pierre-Marcellin Lortic - Baudelaire's binder.

The first complete edition of the works of Molière, edited by two of his close friends, Vinot and the actor Charles Varlet de la Grange who was also his troupe’s secretary: “For this edition, publishers used Molière’s manuscript texts, more or less corrected by him either according to the needs of performances or publication. This means that the text of 1682 often differs slightly from the separate first editions and the collected edition of 1674....Despite this, it is the text that has most often served as a source for the numerous later editions published right up to the present time” (J. Le Petit, Bibliographie des principales éditions originales).

According to Anaïs Bazin, “It is in the Préface by Lagrange and Vinot, placed at the beginning of the first edition of the Œuvres complètes de Molière (1682); there, and nowhere else, we still find today the only reliable and acceptable information — perhaps the only information, and this conjecture is a serious one — that Molière wished to leave to the public concerning his fifty-one-year career!” (Notes historiques sur la vie de Molière, Techener, 1851). This slightly excessive sentence nevertheless highlights the unique importance of these first biographical notes written by close friends of the greatest French dramatist.

It also reveals numerous faults within the known versions of Molière’s final play and masterpiece, Le Malade imaginaire, printed after the author’s death. “This comedy is corrected from the author’s original manuscript and free of all the false additions and presumed scenes inserted in previous editions. And, to highlight this declaration even further, they take care to write at the beginning of two scenes in the first act, that the text — actually the entire act — was not Molière’s in the previous editions, and that they publish here the author’s original scenes.”

In his bibliography, Albert-Jean Guibert would conclude: “This edition must be regarded, quite rightly, as the most complete of the seventeenth-century editions. Stage directions are included and for the first time each comedy is preceded by an engraving, particularly valuable for the attitudes and costumes of the characters.”