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First edition, with an autograph letter signed by Louise Colet bound in, 3 pages on a bifolium mounted on a stub at the head of the volume. A few small foxing spots, a very pale marginal dampstain affecting the last leaves.
Half black morocco binding with corners, spine with five raised bands framed by blind double fillets, date at the foot, marbled paper sides, vat-made paper endpapers and pastedowns, original wrappers preserved and mounted on a stub (small corner losses restored), elegant binding signed Patrice Goy.
Rare presentation copy to the marquise de Boissy, Teresa Guiccioli who was the mistress of Louise Colet's husband (!) and remains famous for her liaison with Lord Byron. 

Colet describes her in these terms in the novel: "a lady who was to Byron what Beatrix was to Dante and Vittoria Colonna to Michelangelo" (p. 201).
A rare association and perfectly preserved copy.

Colet's dedicatee was no stranger to scandal: the countess Guiccioli, who had become the marquise de Boissy was Byron's last great love and had even been the mistress of Louise Colet's husband, Hippolyte, while Colet was carrying on a much-criticized affair with the academician Victor Cousin.

Louise Colet even chose the title of marquise for her own character in this novel, the ambitious and charming Stéphanie de Rostan. "They tried to break me when this book came out", she wrote. The book famously recounts her passions and sorrows with the leading figures of Romanticism and Realism, Musset and Flaubert: portrayed as Albert de Lincel, a poet of sickly, alcoholic genius, and Léonce, the absent correspondent who held art in much greater esteemed than love.

The marquise de Boissy had every reason to be moved by this novel, which reveals tumultuous relationships with literary giants – Teresa Guiccioli herself had devoted her later years to writing the biography of her celebrated lover. Colet, the quintessential Romantic poetess, revered Byron's genius, having placed one of his lines as the epigraph to her first collection, Fleurs du midi (1836): "Child of the sun… soul of fire". The rare surviving letters between the two women attest precisely to their exchanges on the subject of Byron – Colet even tells her, in the letter bound at the head of this volume, that she has transcribed in full one of the marquise's letters: "The book I am gifting you only comes out on sale today [...] I am citing in a footnote the interesting letter you wrote me about him" (published between pp. 201-206 of the present work).

Colet even begins the letter with "Dear Marquise", perhaps a playful nod to her correspondent's status as the British poet's mistress, and tells her of her imminent journey to Italy: "I will be traveling to Genoa, Torino, Milan, Venice et finally Florence […] I will be overjoyed to see you again and converse about a thousand other things". A few weeks later, Colet would join the marquise, who showed her Venice in Byron's footsteps:"I am glad to be led by a Guiccioli, a name so dear to the poet, whithin the walls where something of him still lingers" (L’Italie des Italiens, 1862, p. 307).

A superb presentation inscription from a free-spirited and paradoxical writer, in her most famous autofictional novel, to one of the great literary muses of the nineteenth century.