Recueil des lettres de Madame la marquise de Sévigné a Madame la Comtesse de Grignan, sa fille

Paris, Nicolas Simart, 1734, and Rollin fils, 1737. Six duodecimo volumes.

First official edition, largely in first printing, of the Recueil des lettres de Madame la marquise de Sévigné à Madame la comtesse de Grignan, sa fille, edited by Denis-Marius Perrin under the supervision of Pauline de Simiane, the author's granddaughter. The first four volumes were published by Nicolas Simart in 1734; the final two, completing the collection, by Rollin fils in 1737. The set contains 614 letters, all addressed to Madame de Grignan.

Two engraved portraits give the correspondence its visual dialogue: Madame de Sévigné, engraved by Jacques Chéreau, opens the first volume; Madame de Grignan, engraved by Petit, appears at the beginning of the fifth. Almost the entire work unfolds between these two images, as though the edition had physically placed the mother's voice before the daughter for whom it was intended.

Uniform contemporary full speckled brown calf, spines with raised bands richly decorated in gilt, including animal tools at the foot. Beige morocco lettering and volume labels to the first four volumes, red morocco labels to the final two.

Small loss at the foot of volume VI. Discreet, almost invisible restorations at the heads of volumes I, IV and VI and at the feet of volumes II, III and V; several joints also skilfully restored. Eight corners slightly worn, the others rubbed, with some rubbing to the joints.

A handsome copy, particularly appealing for the uniformity of its six contemporary bindings despite the three-year interval between the two stages of publication.

Before 1734, Madame de Sévigné's letters had already begun to escape the control of her family. A clandestine publication of 1725 contained twenty-eight letters or fragments; in the following year a Rouen edition increased the number to 134, soon followed at The Hague by a collection of 177. Derived from copies, these texts were incomplete and frequently corrupt. Pauline de Simiane, daughter of Madame de Grignan, therefore resolved to regain control of a correspondence whose surviving manuscripts addressed to her mother were in her possession.

She entrusted the task to her friend Denis-Marius Perrin of Aix-en-Provence. His methods were far removed from those of a modern scholarly editor: he established the chronology of letters whose year was not always indicated, removed passages considered excessively domestic, indiscreet or stylistically careless, divided some letters and rewrote portions of others. According to Roger Duchêne's research, more than a third of the original text was eliminated from this first authorised edition. It nevertheless remains substantially closer to the manuscripts than the still more extensively revised edition Perrin published in 1754.

The paradox is considerable. It was through Pauline de Simiane that her grandmother's correspondence was first published on a genuinely substantial and authoritative scale; yet it was also under her supervision that the letters were purged of material thought liable to offend religious scruple, propriety or family memory. Most of the autograph manuscripts used for the edition subsequently disappeared, probably destroyed in connection with this editorial process, leaving later generations unable to recover the original text in its entirety.

The publishing history is itself a story of women and transmission. Madame de Sévigné had never intended these letters for print. She wrote them to Françoise-Marguerite, Comtesse de Grignan, from whom she was separated after her daughter's move to Provence. After the deaths of both mother and daughter, it was Pauline, the third generation of the family, who transformed their private exchange into a published work.

The two portraits consequently acquire a significance beyond mere illustration. Madame de Sévigné's likeness introduces the four volumes of 1734; when the collection resumes in 1737, Madame de Grignan's portrait receives the reader at the opening of volume V. The illustrations symbolically restore the recipient whose own replies have almost entirely disappeared: the daughter remains silent in the text, yet her portrait answers that of her mother.

All 614 letters therefore travel in a single direction. Over nearly a quarter of a century they preserve the voice of a mother telling her daughter of court and Parisian life, marriages, lawsuits, deaths, political and literary news, but also the smallest movements of daily existence, separation and affection. From this persistently private destination emerged one of the great monuments of seventeenth-century French prose.

Only in 1754, after Pauline de Simiane's death, did Perrin issue a new eight-volume edition, expanded to 772 letters and including other correspondents. The 1734-1737 collection therefore retains a particular unity: it is built entirely around the bond between Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan.

A handsome copy in uniform contemporary bindings of the first authorised edition of the Letters. Between the portrait of Madame de Sévigné in the first volume and that of Madame de Grignan in the fifth, these 614 letters for the first time establish in print the dialogue of a mother and daughter, transmitted to the public by the generation that followed them.