Panégyrique de la mère de Dieu

First edition, illustrated with an engraved frontispiece (copperplate) depicting the Virgin Mary tenderly embracing the Christ Child.

Bound in contemporary full mottled brown sheep, smooth spine decorated with gilt bands and fleurons, title label, gilt roll on board edges, shell-marbled paper pastedowns. Some rubbing to the binding, joints slightly weakened, losses to the edges of the lower board, upper margin a little short, the trimming having affected the manuscript inscription on the title page.

Bookplate of Victor Duchâtaux, dated 1887, on the front pastedown. A lawyer in Reims, he served several terms as president of the Académie nationale de Reims and sat on the city council.

Ink inscriptions on the front free endpaper and on the title page, including the ownership inscription of the library of the Jesuit Professed House in Paris:

"Domus prof. Paris. Soc. Jesu." (abbreviation of Domus professae Parisiensis Societatis Jesu).

This discourse in praise of the Virgin is one of the first two works published by Jean-Pierre Camus, alongside the Parénétique de l’amour de Dieu, issued the same year by the same bookseller. It appeared in 1608, the year in which Camus was ordained priest and then nominated to the see of Belley by Henri IV, and therefore predates his episcopal consecration, performed on 30 August 1609 by Francis de Sales. His youth (he was only twenty-four at the time of his consecration) had made a dispensation from Pope Paul V necessary.

The consecration sealed a close friendship with the Bishop of Geneva, whose disciple Camus considered himself and whose portrait he set down in L’Esprit du bienheureux François de Sales (1641). A renowned preacher and deputy for the clergy at the Estates General of 1614, he was also one of the most prolific authors of his century: he produced more than two hundred titles, recorded by Jean Descrains in his 1971 bibliography. Among them are numerous "histoires dévotes", edifying novels intended to draw readers away from the fashionable secular romances, as well as virulent pamphlets against the mendicant orders. The text of this panegyric was reprinted in full in the Diversitez (1614), another of the author’s major works. After leaving Belley in the late 1620s, he withdrew to the abbey of Aulnay, near Caen, and later assisted the Archbishop of Rouen, François de Harlay. He spent his last days among the poor of the Hospice des Incurables in Paris, where he died in 1652, shortly after being nominated by Louis XIV to the see of Arras, for which he never received the papal bulls.

This copy brings together the author and its former owners in a singular way. It was with the Jesuits that the young Camus had received the theological training that enabled him to be ordained priest in 1608, the very year this Panégyrique was published. He remained attached to the Society, whose founder he celebrated in his Homélies panégyriques de S. Ignace de Loyola, published in Lyon in 1623. At an unknown date, the book entered the library of the Paris Professed House, as the manuscript inscriptions on the title page attest.

The Jesuit Professed House was founded in 1580 in the Hôtel de La Rochepot, rue Saint-Antoine, which Cardinal Charles de Bourbon had given to the Society. Expelled for several years following Jean Châtel’s attempt on the life of Henri IV, the Jesuits regained possession of the House and made it flourish, notably by building a magnificent church there (now Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis), where Bourdaloue, Bossuet and Ménestrier preached. The House held a renowned library of some 30,000 volumes, which was dispersed in the 1760s, after the establishment was closed by decree of the Parlement de Paris in 1762.

An early work by Jean-Pierre Camus, theologian, prolific writer and friend of Francis de Sales, formerly in the library of the Jesuit Professed House in Paris.