SCANDAL AT THE FRENCH COURT
[COURTILZ DE SANDRAS, Gatien de.]
Les dames dans leur naturel, ou la galanterie sans façon. Sous le regne du Grand Alcandre.
‘A Cologne’ [but The Netherlands], ‘chez Pierre Marteau’, 1686.
12mo, pp. [iv], 228; woodcut printer’s device on title, and headpiece; some spotting and foxing in places, but largely clean and fresh; in later Jansenist red morocco, spine lettered directly in gilt, edges gilt; with the booklabel of the Chateau de Mouchy (Oise) to front pastedown.
Added to your basket:
Les dames dans leur naturel, ou la galanterie sans façon. Sous le regne du Grand Alcandre.
First edition, uncommon, of this tale of the debauchery of the ladies at Louis XIV’s court, purportedly ‘found in a cabinet, long after it had been written’ by the author.
Les dames dans leur naturel is the work French novelist and pamphleteer Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras (1644–1712), imprisoned in the Bastille 1702–11, nowadays best known for his semi-fictionalised Mémoires de Mr. d’Artagnan, which heavily influenced Dumas’ Three Musketeers. Despite its claims of antiquity, the reign of the ‘Grand Alcandre’ in which the present work is set is clearly that of Louis XIV, and the novel satirises the court and the women at it in a way that echoes Bussy-Rabutin’s Histoire amoureuse des Gaules of two decades previous.
The imprint, understandably, is a false one, often used (and possibly created) by the Elzevirs for satirical, political, and sexually explicit works, but used from the 1660s onwards by several Amsterdam printers for French books, and more broadly from the 1680s.
Outside continental Europe, OCLC finds three copies in North America (Newberry, Princeton, Toronto) and one in the UK (BL), as well as New South Wales and Trinity College Dublin.
BM STC German C1179; STCN 419523170; USTC 1565451, 1543128, and 2646344; VD17 12:650059N; Barbier I, col. 835; Cioranescu 22307; Gay II, p. 370; De Brouillant, Histoire de Pierre de Marteau: Imprimeur à Cologne, p. 136.
