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La vie & les gestes du preux Chevalier Bayard. Contenant plusieurs victoires par luy faictes durant le regne des Roys de France Charles huictiesme, Loys douziesme, & de Francois premier de ce nom, tant es Italies, Naples, & Picardie, que autres pays & regions. Paris, Nicolas Bonfons, [c. 1580s]. [bound with:] BOUCHET, Jean. [Le panegyric du chevallier sans reproche.]

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An otherwise unrecorded late sixteenth-century edition of Champier’s life of the Chevalier de Bayard, bound with the first edition of an account of Louis de la Trémoille, from the renowned library of Guyon de Sardière.

Pierre Terrail (c. 1473–1524), seigneur de Bayard, fought in the Italian Wars of Charles VIII, Louis XII and François I, taking an active role in the most significant battles and sieges including Fornovo (1495), Agnadello (1509), and Marignano (1515). His deeds and actions turned him into a national hero, at a time when warfare was transforming itself from medieval knights on horseback into artillery-based combat; although he knighted the young François I on the battlefield at Marignano, he was eventually killed by a bullet.

Symphorien Champier (1471–1539), a doctor from Lyon, was married to Marguerite Terrail, a cousin of the Chevalier; as physician to Antoine duke of Lorraine, he accompanied the French army to Italy, tending to Bayard’s battlefield wounds himself in 1512. He was therefore able to report events first-hand, composing his account of Bayard’s life shortly after he died in 1524; first printed in Lyon in 1525, this is perhaps the tenth printing. It was a very popular work; despite the numerous editions printed in both Lyon and Paris, very few copies have survived.

The printer Nicolas Bonfons was active in Paris between 1572 and 1618, and, like his father Jean, specialised in chivalric literature and vernacular devotion, which have a generally low rate of survival. His edition is presumably reprinted from his father Jean’s edition of c. 1558/68 [Bechtel C-146], though the Peterhouse copy of that earlier printing has a final quire P2 with printer’s device on final leaf, not present in this later edition.

Jean Bouchet (1476–1557) wrote numerous works on history and chivalry from 1503 onwards. He worked for the La Trémoille family from 1510 onwards, also arranging the ceremonial entry of François I into Poitiers in 1520, and he corresponded with Rabelais and Ronsard’s father. He composed this edifying panegyric to glorify his patron, though unlike his other historical works, it was not reprinted during the sixteenth century. His works were published by the de Marnef family from 1518 onwards, following a dispute with his previous publisher Antoine Vérard.

Louis de La Trémoille (1460–1525), from Poitou, similarly served in the Italian campaigns under Charles VIII, Louis XII, and François I. Like the Chevalier de Bayard, he was at the Battles of Fornovo, Agnadello and Marignano, eventually dying (also from a shotgun wound) at the disastrous Battle of Pavia where François was taken hostage by Charles V. He married the daughter of Cesare Borgia and Charlotte d’Albret in 1517. Bouchet’s text also contains the earliest description of the Battle of Pavia, drawn from various eye-witness accounts.

The Bouchet and de Marnef families were early arrivals on the printing scene in Poitiers, both establishing long-lived printing dynasties, the de Marnefs having expanded to Poitiers from their Paris printshop. The address given in the colophon, ‘Au Pellican’, belongs to Enguilbert II de Marnef (active 1518–1528, whose device was on the absent title-page). Jacques Bouchet learned his trade in his uncle Guillaume’s workshop and was actively printing in Poitiers from 1520 to 1550. While the majority of his output was in gothic typefaces, as here, the last two leaves contain (Latin) verses in roman type, which he began to use consistently from the early 1540s (Walsby, p. 148).

Provenance:
Jean-Baptiste-Denis Guyon, seigneur de Sardière (1674–1759), his signature in each part. It was item 1688 in the 1759 sale catalogue of his library, which was bought en bloc by Louis César de La Baume Le Blanc, duc de La Vallière (1708–1780). The vast La Vallière library was sold across numerous sales, but we have not been able to trace this volume in any of them (lot 5089 in the 1783 catalogue was a copy of the Bouchet, but seemingly not incomplete).

I: We have been unable to trace any other copies. II: We have located four copies in the US: Boston Athenaeum, Harvard, Virginia, Newberry; and four copies in the UK: Rylands, Bodleian, and two in the British Library.

I: Not in USTC, BP16, CCFr, IA, or Adams; II: BP16 105326; USTC 8402; Bechtel B-321; Desgraves, Rép. bibl. xvie siècle, Poitiers: Jean Bouchet 19; Britnell, Jean Bouchet (1986), no.12 in the bibliography. Not in Adams. See Walsby, Booksellers and Printers in provincial France 1470–1600 (2021), pp. 148–149.