Les intrigues du cabinet des rats

Illustrated edition with twenty-two copper-engraved vignettes, including one used as frontispiece. A few engraved tailpieces.

Plain wrappers in blue-grey, with manuscript title and date written lengthwise on the spine in ink. Wrappers slightly soiled, with a few creases and tears; scattered foxing and soiling to the leaves.

A late version of the Roman de Renart, born of the text's wanderings between France and Germany. It is a reprint of a work published in Brussels by Jacques Panneels and Charles de Vos in 1739 under the title Le renard, ou le procez des bestes. That text is, in turn, presented as a French translation of a fifteenth-century Low Saxon version of the fox's tale, attributed to Hinrek van Alckmer.

The Roman de Renart, which first appeared in manuscript form during the medieval period, is a work whose history is just as complex as that of the 1788 printed edition. More a compilation of tales than a novel in the usual sense, it brings together texts written between 1170 and 1250 by various, mostly anonymous authors, situated within the long tradition of Latin animal fables going back to Aesop. The earliest German version of the Roman de Renart was composed in the second half of the twelfth century by the Alsatian Heinrich der Glichesaere; titled Isengrīnes nōt ("Ysengrin's woe") in a thirteenth-century manuscript, it received the title Reinhart Fuchs in the fourteenth century. It was, however, the Low Saxon version titled Reynke de vos that inspired, in the eighteenth century, Johann Christoph Gottsched, and through him, Goethe, for their respective versions of Reineke Fuchs.

Rather than recounting the fox's misadventures leading up to his trial, Les intrigues du cabinet des rats places the reader directly in the animal court where his cunning is pitted against justice. Beneath its animal mask lies a striking critique of judicial abuse, corruption, and the duplicity of courtiers. This satire belongs to a political and publishing climate especially favourable to this type of literature: the years 1787-1788 indeed saw a proliferation, on the margins of royal censorship, of pamphlets and libels denouncing the abuses of the nobility, the clergy, and the justice system of the Ancien Régime, amid the financial and institutional crisis that preceded the convening of the Estates-General. It may be no coincidence that this Parisian reissue of an old apologue, whose very subtitle proclaims a "national" purpose, appeared in 1788, the year before the Revolution.

An illustrated edition of an old social satire, its message more timely than ever on the eve of the Ancien Régime's collapse.