Paris for the English
[BOYER, Abel.]
A View of Paris, and Places adjoining. With an Account of the Court of France; and of the late King James … Written by a Gentleman lately residing at Paris. London, John Nutt, 1701.
8vo, pp. [viii], 92, [4, advertisements], without the half-title or Contents and Errata leaves (A6–7), but see below; title verso and facing page rather dusty, else a very good crisp copy; in modern full calf; armorial bookplate to title verso of Richard Syms, Esq, dated 1703; five faint manuscript corrections to the errata in brown pen (autograph?); faint blind stamp to title of St George’s Hanover Square Public Libraries.
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A View of Paris, and Places adjoining. With an Account of the Court of France; and of the late King James … Written by a Gentleman lately residing at Paris.
The dedication copy, an apparently unique first issue naming the author at the end of the dedication as Abel Boyer – a new attribution. A political travel guide to Paris, it covers the capital by both topic (Cabarets, Beggars, Extravagance and Luxury) and location (Foire St Germain, Louvre, Fontainebleau).
The journalist and lexicographer Abel Boyer (1667?–1729) fled France to the Netherlands after the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685, coming to England in 1689, where he published his Compleat French Master in 1694, and then his ambitious Royal Dictionary (1699), an innovative work which cited ‘recent and living writers as sources or authorities … by attempting to convey the variety of meanings of a word according to word usage as found in their works’ (ODNB).
Curiously for one who courted patronage at the highest level – the Dictionary was dedicated to Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, and we have had a copy presented to the Duke of Marlborough – Boyer's View of Paris has a much more minor dedicatee: Richard Syms or Symes (d. 1728), of Blackheath, originally of Gloucestershire, who seems to have commissioned it. ‘I will send you my Observations, in the same order I have set them down in my Table-Book: and be as familiar and sincere in my Relation, as I us’d to be in your Conversation’. It is apparently based on a residence of seven months in Paris in 1700, and the pose is ostensibly that of an Englishman, boastful of Newton and Locke over Ozanam and Malebranche, and mildly disdainful of French women (who are ‘extream fond of Lap-dogs and Monkeys’, and often cuckold their husbands). Signing his own name to the work would evidently have exploded the fiction, so when properly published the work was anonymous, though short passages on French protestants and the French tongue hint at him.
In this unrecorded first issue, apart from the presence of Boyer’s name, the rules at the head of A3ʳ and foot of A5ʳ are different. The published version has seven preliminary leaves rather than the half-sheet of four here, adding contents and errata. Some but not all of the errata have been corrected in pen here.
Cf. ESTC T63177 (as anonymous).