Les oeuvres

First edition, illustrated with a frontispiece by Mellan and a portrait of the author by Champaigne engraved by Nanteuil, published posthumously by the author's nephew, Martin de Pinchesne.
Contemporary late 18th-century full mottled calf. Spine with raised bands, richly gilt in a grotesque pattern with two alternating tools. Pink calf lettering-piece. Joints split at the head. Worming at the foot. Two corners bumped. Some rubbing. A few leaves evenly browned, others lightly yellowed. Headcap clumsily restored. Yellow dampstain to the lower outer corner of the first 30 pages.

The first edition of the work from which La Fontaine acknowledged drawing the hidden lesson of his Fables: « J'ai profité dans Voiture ».

Vincent Voiture (Amiens, 1597 – Paris, 1648), the son of a royal wine merchant, gained the patronage of Gaston d'Orléans while still a young man, became one of the founding members of the Académie française in 1634, and emerged as the sparkling wit of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where the ideals of préciosité and classical taste took shape. As a diplomat in Spain, Lorraine and Rome, he dispatched epistles that became literary events among the cultivated elite. He published nothing during his lifetime. A year after his death, the celebrated quarrel of the sonnets broke out, pitting admirers of his sonnet Uranie against supporters of Benserade's Job, the first major aesthetic controversy of seventeenth-century France.

Two years later, the present first edition appeared, published by Augustin Courbé, edited by his nephew Martin de Pinchesne, and adorned with a frontispiece by Claude Mellan and a portrait of Voiture by Philippe de Champaigne engraved by Robert Nanteuil. In his preface, Pinchesne immediately defines Voiture's originality: a man who « approchait fort près, au jugement de toutes les dames, des perfections que les Italiens décrivent sous le nom de parfait courtisan et que les Français appellent un galant homme », born a commoner yet owing this remarkable distinction to his effortless grace and noble boldness tempered by polished civility. The volume brings together occasional letters and poems, rondeaux, songs, stanzas and gallant verse, reviving the lighter poetic forms that had flourished since Marot. It introduced into French literature a new type of work, one initially viewed with suspicion by those who regarded literature chiefly as a matter of strict rules and learned culture.

Its influence upon La Fontaine was profound, though not immediate. In 1650, the future fabulist remained too devoted to an elevated conception of literature to appreciate the work of so worldly an entertainer. It was only at the court of Fouquet, around 1658–1659, that he came to grasp its significance through Sarasin, Voiture's friend and literary heir. There, La Fontaine discovered that great poetry could also « couler comme une paisible rivière », that a natural and even style capable of treating modest subjects without descending into triviality could rival heroic grandeur, and that Voiture had been the inventor of this manner of expression. He would later write, with characteristic brevity: « J'ai profité dans Voiture. » At Vaux, under this dual influence, he increasingly embraced gallant lightness, shifts of tone and the art of surprise. Boileau and La Fontaine would soon rank Voiture alongside Marot and Horace.