L'Heptaméron des nouvelles de Marguerite de Navarre

Paris, Auguste Eudes, 1880. Four stout octavo volumes.

A handsome bibliophile edition of the Heptaméron, reproducing the critical text established from the manuscripts by Le Roux de Lincy for the Société des Bibliophiles françois in 1853-1854, revised and augmented for the present edition by Anatole de Montaiglon.

The deluxe issue was limited to 395 copies on special papers. This copy, no. 301, is one of 40 on Whatman paper with the engravings in three states: one in black on Japan paper, one in bistre and one in sanguine on Whatman. This was among the most desirable issues of the edition, preceded only by the exceptionally limited copies on Japan paper and vellum.

The illustration comprises a portrait of Marguerite de Navarre drawn and engraved by T. de Mare, a frontispiece designed by Dunker and engraved by Eichler, and 76 plates after Freudenberg, engraved by De Longueil, Eichler, Le Roy, Halbou, Thiébault and others. With numerous head- and tailpieces. A chromolithographed plate reproduces the arms of Marguerite de Navarre. All the engravings are present in the three states called for in this issue, with the exception of the chromolithograph.

Superb contemporary full citron morocco by Allô. Spines with five raised bands, decorated with Marguerite de Navarre's repeated cipher and fleurs-de-lys within richly gilt compartments of small tools and rolls; her arms gilt at the centre of each board within a triple gilt fillet. Broad gilt dentelle turn-ins, comb-marbled endpapers and pastedowns in burgundy, green and blue. Entirely untrimmed.

A fine scratch to the lower board of volume II and a small area of surface abrasion along its lower joint. A very few isolated spots. An exceptionally fresh set overall, the plates naturally having somewhat shorter margins than the untrimmed text leaves.

The particular distinction of this edition lies in the meeting of two enterprises separated by a century. Its text derives from the major philological advance achieved by Le Roux de Lincy in 1853-1854. Earlier editions had largely perpetuated the version revised by Claude Gruget in the sixteenth century. Le Roux de Lincy returned to the manuscripts in order to restore the Heptaméron and accompanied the text with an extensive scholarly apparatus. Montaiglon himself regarded this as a decisive achievement, describing it as the first critical and definitive establishment of the text.

When the bookseller Auguste Eudes planned a new edition in the 1870s, he sought permission from the Société des Bibliophiles françois to reproduce Le Roux de Lincy's text and notes. The project was simultaneously inspired by an exceptional acquisition: the original copperplates engraved after Freudenberg for the celebrated Berne edition of 1780-1781. The plates were restored, while Dunker's headpieces and ornaments were newly engraved on copper. A major nineteenth-century critical text was thus clothed in one of the most celebrated eighteenth-century illustrative cycles devoted to Marguerite de Navarre's book.

Montaiglon did considerably more than oversee its reprinting. An archivist-palaeographer, art historian and professor at the École des Chartes, he supplied a new introductory essay and expanded the documentary material surrounding the text. Charles de Sainte-Marthe's funeral oration for Marguerite is reproduced in full; the passages from Brantôme are enlarged; Le Roux de Lincy's notices of the manuscripts and editions are retained and supplemented by a special study of the Berne edition. The notes, glossary and index are gathered in the final volume.

The illustrations consequently acquire a historical significance of their own. Freudenberg had devised a scene for each tale in the Berne edition, while Dunker supplied its ornamental programme. Engraved in Paris by leading craftsmen of the period, these compositions belong to the narrative refinement of late eighteenth-century French book illustration. In 1880 Eudes did not attempt to modernise the Heptaméron: he revived its earlier copperplates and set them against a text newly restored by philology. Montaiglon himself defined the edition in precisely these terms, as both a revival of the artists of the preceding century and a tribute to Le Roux de Lincy's scholarship.

Marguerite de Navarre's seventy-two tales, arranged over seven complete days and the beginning of an eighth, are thus placed between two great ages of bibliophily. The Renaissance text is answered by its elegant eighteenth-century visual interpretation; the nineteenth century in turn adds the return to manuscript sources, critical scholarship, deluxe papers, suites of plates and fine binding. The 1880 edition deliberately celebrates this layering rather than attempting to conceal it.

Allô's binding provides the final element in this reconstruction. Marguerite's cipher, fleurs-de-lys and arms, impressed on citron morocco around four volumes retaining their full margins, extend the same historical imagination from scholarship and illustration to the physical book itself.

A magnificent copy on Whatman paper with the engravings in three states, superbly bound by Allô in citron morocco with the arms of Marguerite de Navarre. A Renaissance text recovered by nineteenth-century scholarship, a great eighteenth-century illustrative cycle revived from its copperplates, and contemporary French fine binding come together here in three centuries of the history of the book.