Les Saisons, pöeme

New edition revised by the author, illustrated with 4 copper-engraved plates by Morel after drawings by Chaudet (Cohen, col. 927). A sumptuous publication from the press of Pierre Didot l'aîné, the foremost printer of his day. This edition is distinguished from all previous ones by its entirely renewed illustration in a neoclassical spirit, in keeping with the aesthetic of the Directoire period. It is the first to have been revised by the author himself.
Contemporary binding in full red morocco, spine with five raised bands richly decorated with gilt dentelles, fillets and fleurons, boards framed with a double gilt dentelle, gilt roll on the turn-ins and headbands, pastedowns and doublures — framed with a gilt dentelle — of marbled paper, all edges gilt.

The first edition of Les Saisons, published in 1769, had secured Saint-Lambert's reputation and earned him a seat at the Académie française, with the support of Voltaire, who wrote of the poem: « C'est le seul ouvrage de notre siècle qui passera à la postérité. » The present edition appears at a singular moment: two years after the abolition of slavery voted by the Convention on 4 February 1794, and at a time when Saint-Lambert, then eighty years old, was himself revising his work for the last major edition of his lifetime. The choice of Didot as printer — whose productions then represented the pinnacle of French typographical luxury — and the very date of publication lend this volume a significance that goes well beyond a simple reprint.

The work 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 latter open with a "Préface de Saadi" — an explicit attribution, new to this edition relative to those of 1769 and 1775, of the free adaptation of the preface to the Gulistan (the "Rose Garden", 13th century) that has appeared in the collection since the first edition. It is in this author-revised edition that Saint-Lambert publicly acknowledges his debt to Persian literature, at the very moment when the first complete French translation of the Gulistan had just appeared (abbé Gaudin, 1789).

It is through Ziméo, included in the collection since the first edition of 1769, that Saint-Lambert's work occupies a singular place in the literary history of the Enlightenment. One of the rare texts of this period to stage a slave insurrection — where Voltaire in Candide had sketched only a solitary figure of revolt — this tale constructs an African hero of full epic dignity, and predates both the insurgent figure in Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1771) and the celebrated antislavery passage of the Histoire philosophique des deux Indes, attributed to Diderot, which did not appear until the 1780 edition. It is worth noting, however, that this 1796 edition, unlike its predecessors, does not reproduce the "Réflexions sur les Nègres" that followed Ziméo in the editions of 1769 and 1775 — a text in which Saint-Lambert had argued that the faults attributed to Africans « sont de l'esclavage » and not of nature. This omission, occurring barely two years after the abolition decree, remains difficult to interpret with certainty: an editorial choice dictated by the luxurious format of the publication, a calculated discretion in a still unstable political climate in which the colonial question was far from settled under the Directoire... unless this very absence of advocacy is precisely the sign of the triumph of the humanist ideals for which the author no longer needed to argue, having been fully vindicated by the Convention, which voted the abolition of slavery on 4 February 1794 (16 Pluviôse, Year II).

A fine copy in a handsome contemporary binding of full red morocco, of the definitive edition revised by the author, published two years after the abolition of slavery.