Les Saisons, poëme.

Seventh edition, first to illustrate Zimeo, adorned with 7 plates by Moreau le Jeune: a frontispiece and 4 plates for Les Saisons, engraved by Delaunay, Duclos, Prévost and Simonet, and 2 plates for the Contes, Poésies fugitives and Fables orientales, together with 4 headpiece vignettes by Choffard. Our copy is further enriched with separate pulls of the title-page ornament and Choffard's vignettes.
Nineteenth-century binding in full midnight-blue morocco. Five-raised-band spine decorated with pastoral flowers (vine, wheat and billhook, game and hunting horn...) and gilt compartments. Triple gilt fillet and geometric gilt lace border to boards. Wide gilt lace border to doublures of marbled paper. 
Upper joint rubbed.

The first edition of Les Saisons, published in 1769 with illustrations by Gravelot and Le Prince, had secured Saint-Lambert's reputation and earned him a place at the Académie française. The present seventh edition (Cohen/Ricci Sp. 926; Sander 1779), retaining the fictitious imprint « Amsterdam » concealing a Parisian printer, is the first to include an illustration for Zimeo, the anti-slavery philosophical tale that had been part of the volume since the first edition:

Moreau's frontispiece, captioned "j'aimerai deux blancs, dit-il", gives a face for the first time 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..., Zimeo), the Pièces fugitives and the Fables orientales.
The Fables orientales open with a prefatory 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 (it would be in the 1796 edition), yet it represents one of the rare French versions of this text available 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 Zimeo, included in the collection since the first edition, that this work by Saint-Lambert holds a singular place in European literary history. This philosophical tale is one of the rare Enlightenment texts to stage a slave insurrection, where Voltaire, in Candide, had sketched only a solitary figure of revolt. Drawing on Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), translated into French by La Place in 1745, Saint-Lambert constructs a Black hero endowed with full epic dignity, and appends to the narrative « Réflexions sur les Nègres » in which he systematically dismantles racial prejudice, asserting that the faults attributed to Africans « sont de l'esclavage » and not of nature. Chronologically, Zimeo precedes the figure of the rebel in Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1771), and the celebrated anti-slavery passage of the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, attributed to Diderot, which did not appear until 1780. The present 1775 edition is precisely the first to furnish the tale with an illustration: Moreau le Jeune's frontispiece, depicting Zimeo rescuing two white captives, gives a visual image for the first time to Saint-Lambert's Black hero, at the very moment when the abolitionist debate was beginning to gather momentum in France.

From the libraries of Francis Kettaneh (1897–1976) and Irwin Laughlin (1871–1941), with their bookplates. Francis Kettaneh, a businessman born in Lebanon, was one of the great American bibliophiles of the twentieth century, whose bookplate bears the motto Mehr Licht (Goethe's last words). Irwin Boyle Laughlin, an American diplomat, served as United States Minister Plenipotentiary to Greece (1924–1926) and subsequently as Ambassador to Spain (1929–1933); a passionate collector of eighteenth-century French art and books, he commissioned the construction of Meridian House in Washington, which he furnished with drawings and decorative arts of the period.

A fine copy in a grand nineteenth-century bibliophile binding, enriched with a suite of Choffard's vignettes, with a double and distinguished provenance.