Les Saisons, poëme.

Seventh edition, first issue of Moreau le Jeune's illustrations, adorned with 7 plates: a frontispiece and 4 plates for Les Saisons, engraved by Delaunay, Duclos, Lebas and Prévost, and 2 plates for the Contes, Poésies fugitives and Fables orientales, together with headpiece vignettes by Choffard, reprinted from the first edition of 1769.
Contemporary full calf binding. Richly decorated smooth spine. Red morocco lettering-piece. Boards in mottled calf (with Greek-key border) added at a later date during restoration. Worn corners. A split to the upper joint extending 5 cm. A very good copy overall.

The first edition of Les Saisons, published in 1769 with illustrations by Gravelot and Le Prince, had established Saint-Lambert's reputation and secured his election to the Académie française, with the support of Voltaire. The present seventh edition (Cohen/Ricci Sp. 926; Sander 1779) is a reprint of the 1769 edition, retaining Choffard's headpiece vignettes, but distinguished by the addition of 7 plates by Moreau le Jeune — absent from all earlier editions — and the use of laid paper in place of the fine paper of the original. It is also the first edition to illustrate Ziméo: Moreau's frontispiece, captioned "j'aimerai deux blancs, dit-il", gives for the first time a face to the first Black insurgent hero in French literature.

The volume contains, in addition to the long poem in four cantos devoted to the seasons and its preface on bucolic and pastoral poetry, the tales (L'Abénaki, Sara Th..., Ziméo), the Pièces fugitives and the Fables orientales.
The Fables orientales open with a preliminary text constituting a free adaptation of the preface to Saadi's Gulistan (the "Rose Garden", 13th century). This adaptation is not yet attributed to Saadi in the table of contents (an attribution that would appear only in the 1796 edition), yet it represents one of the rare accessible French versions of this text in the interval between André du Ryer's partial translation (1634) and the first complete translation by the Abbé Gaudin (1789).

It is above all through the anti-slavery philosophical tale Ziméo, included in the collection since the first edition, that this work by Saint-Lambert occupies a singular place in the literary history of the Enlightenment. First published in 1769, it is one of the rare texts of the period to stage a slave insurrection, at a moment when Voltaire, in Candide, had only sketched a solitary figure of revolt. Saint-Lambert constructs an African hero endowed with full epic dignity, and follows his narrative with "Réflexions sur les Nègres", in which he dismantles racial prejudice, asserting that the faults attributed to Africans "sont de l'esclavage" and not of nature. Chronologically, Ziméo predates the figure of the rebel in Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1771), and the celebrated anti-slavery passage in the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes attributed to Diderot, which appeared only in the expanded edition of 1780.

A copy in contemporary binding, first issue of Moreau le Jeune's illustrations and first illustrated edition of the Enlightenment's pioneering anti-slavery tale.