La fausse Clelie. Histoire françoise, galante et comique

New edition, rare, illustrated with five figures by Romain de Hoogue, unsigned. These illustrations differ from the Etienne Rogier 1710 edition. The novel was erroneously attributed to Robert Challe by Barbier. The first edition, of which no copy is known, would have been printed in 1670. One figure is missing at page 261.
Full red morocco binding ca 1860 signed Hardy-Mennil on the pastedown. Spine with raised bands decorated. Gilt title and date. Triple fillet frame on boards. Rich inner fillet border. Gilt edges. Very handsome copy, perfectly executed.
Sentimental novel set at Vaux-le-Vicomte with a most extraordinary plot. The Marquis de Ribeville falls in love with a melancholy and silent young woman. He saves her from certain peril. She tells her story believing herself to be Clélie, the heroine of Scudery's eponymous novel. She would thus be the daughter of Clélius, in retreat in Carthage to avoid the vengeance of the last of the Tarquins. The name given then to this type of patient was visionary. The novel contains multiple secondary love stories thus embracing the preoccupations of courtiers residing at Vaux and Fontainebleau. Subligny thus curiously follows the guiding thread of Don Quixote, but in feminine and French form, a heroine who, through excessive reading of Scudéry's precious novels, herself embodies in 17th-century reality a literary character from Antiquity. This is therefore an antithesis of the idealized gallant and precious novel that Subligny provides, the choice to place his characters in contemporary reality is already a strong critique of the novelistic literature of the era.