Amorous Adventures
[DE GRAAFT, attributed.]
Avantures secrettes, et plaisantes. Recueillies par Monsieur de G***. Brussels, George de Backer, 1696.
12mo, pp. [vi], 136, engraved frontispiece by Jacobus Harrewijn; woodcut ornament to title, woodcut and typographic headpieces, woodcut initials; uniformly toned, slight marginal dampstaining, slight soiling to title, a few spots; else a good copy in nineteenth-century blue wrappers, paper spine label lettered in manuscript; nineteenth-century ownership inscription ‘[–] Wallsheim’ to inside front wrapper.
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Avantures secrettes, et plaisantes. Recueillies par Monsieur de G***.
Scarce first Brussels edition, published in the same year as the Paris edition, of this collection of twenty-four amorous and amusing tales set during the reign of Louis XIV, purporting to be true stories with the names changed to protect the characters’ identities.
The stories feature, inter alia, cross-dressing; an amorous father-in-law; a young woman unsuccessfully seduced by a German (‘not the most refined of Europeans when it comes to gallantry’, p. 37, trans.); a jealous doctor deceived by his wife (featuring an incident involving a barrel of excrement); a priest encountering a man presumed to be dead and taking him for a spirit (the ‘dead’ man, in turn, mistaking him for a demon dressed as a priest); a man pretending to be a Polish prince; masquerades and lavish parties; and an abbot in the Tuileries.
The lively frontispiece by Jacobus Harrewijn (Brussels, fl. 1695–1714) depicts a fire-breathing demon and a man gesticulating wildly in the foreground, and in the background are two men digging a pit and several men and women in a room; a stool has been knocked over amidst the revelry. The Paris edition of 1696 was issued without a frontispiece; de Backer published a further edition in Brussels in 1706.
OCLC finds three copies only, all of which in continental Europe.
Barbier I, col. 346; Gay I, p. 357; Hayn 75; see Lever, p. 87.