SPA WATER A-GO-GO
[DE LA GUTHÈRE.]
Du bon usage des eaux de Baignieres.
Agen, Antoine Bru … 1680.
4to, pp. 15, [1]; woodcut device to title-page (a crown with vines and the motto ‘Vive Jesus et Louis’), woodcut headpieces and initials; final leaf worn (dusty on blank verso), several holes (not affecting text, but the wear touching a couple of letters on the preceding leaf); withal a good copy, disbound; eighteenth-century inscription ‘Pamphlett’s &c. No (14)’ to final verso.
Scarce second edition, revised, a guide to the waters at Bagnères-de-Bigorre in southwest France by a local physician, with a new dedication to the ten-year-old Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, duc de Maine (1670–1736), son of Louis XIV and his mistress Madame de Montespan.
Louis-Auguste was legitimised in 1673, aged three, and the following year was introduced to the court at Versailles. He had been born with one leg shorter than the other, and among the treatments he was subjected to as a child was a visit, incognito (though evidently not enough so), to the Pyrenean spa towns of Barèges and nearby Bagnères, where the waters, according to De la Guthère, ‘in restoring the use of your limbs, have given you something more precious than life itself’ (trans.), and where he encountered wounded soldiers seeking the healing waters after the battle of Seneffe (1674). The main part of the guide is in eight chapters, covering the nature of the waters, the best time to take them, how to prepare, what to do afterwards, and popular errors; chapter five is directed admonishingly at drinkers of the waters ‘qui ne devient heureux en bevant à go go’. The first edition, also very rare, was printed at Toulouse in 1659, and was dedicated to one Mademoiselle de Semur.
OCLC and Library Hub together find a single copy of this edition, at Edinburgh; not in CCFr.
Not in USTC (see 6063643).
