The Hammer of the Saracens: Charles or Childebrand?
CAREL DE SAINTE-GARDE, Jacques.
Les Sarrazins chassez de France. Poëme heroïque. Premiere partie. Paris, Claude Barbin, 1667.
12mo, pp. [xxxvi], 130; bound without final blank L6; typographic ornaments to title, woodcut and typographic headpieces, woodcut initials; a very few light marks, a few shoulder notes trimmed without loss of sense, but a very good copy; bound in nineteenth-century French dark blue morocco, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt, edges gilt, marbled endpapers, green silk placemarker; very slightly rubbed, minimal dampstaining at head of endpapers; old bookseller’s description to front pastedown.
First edition, very rare, of this poetic account of the expulsion of the Saracens from France by Childebrand I and Charles Martel, written by Jacques Carel de Sainte Garde, almoner and counsellor to Louis XIV.
Carel (1620–1684) was ridiculed by Nicolas Boileau in his Art poétique for choosing the little-known Childebrand (c. 678–751) as the hero of his epic poem, although the suggestion that an edition had been published in 1666 under the title Childebrand, ou les Sarrazins chassez de France has been disproven. In the 1668 edition, he changed the title to Charle Martel, ou les Sarrazins chassez de France in honour of Childebrand’s more famous brother, whose victory against Arab invaders at the Battle of Tours in 732 is considered a landmark in the history of western Europe. Yet as seems evident from the dedication to the Sun King which opens this edition (alternately published with and without the added subtitle ‘Première partie’), Carel intended Childebrand to be the focus of his poem. By the time of the 1679 edition, Charle Martel had grown to sixteen books. Prefaced by a short treatise on versification in heroic poetry, this first edition is divided into four books, recounting the struggle of Charles Martel and Childebrand against the ‘Sarrasins’ from the aftermath of the Battle of Tours to the Frankish victory at the Siege of Narbonne.
No copies traced in the UK and only two in the US (Harvard, Yale); OCLC records only three other copies worldwide (BnF, Caen, Göttingen).
See Mantero, ‘Poétique et politique dans le Charle Martel de Carel de Sainte-Garde’, in Wild ed., Épopée et mémoire nationale au XVIIe siècle (2011), pp. 127–141.