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Valérie, ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G… Tome premier [– second].

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Rare first edition of Valérie, the famous semi-autobiographical Romantic novel by the Riga-born mystic and novelist Madame de Krüdener (1766–1824), whose influence as Tsar Alexander I’s spiritual adviser contributed directly to the formation of the Holy Alliance of 1815.

Modelled after Goethe’s Werther and written in the form of letters from the protagonist, Gustave, to his friend Ernest about his yearning for the young noblewoman Valérie (married to Gustave’s adoptive father), Valérie created a literary sensation and became one of the classic novels of the pre-Romantic movement in France, receiving translations into a number of languages (although not apparently into Russian until 2000). Written partly as a roman à clef, it is largely inspired by the author’s romantic liaison with Alexandre de Stakieff (or Stakiev), one of her husband’s secretaries.

Valérie’s success can be attributed largely to the author’s own efforts to publicise it: she simultaneously requested favourable reviews from the likes of Chateaubriand and Jean Paul, and frequented Paris’s most fashionable boutiques incognito to request scarves, ribbons, or shawls à la Valérie, ‘promoting a novel that had just appeared by creating a demand for products that did not even exist yet. In order to be fashionable, consumers and suppliers had to know – or pretend at least to have heard – of objects with a design à la Valérie’ (Hilger, ‘Epistolarity, Publicity, and Painful Sensibility’, The French Review 79:4 (2006), p. 738).

Carteret I, 459; Vicaire IV, cols 723-4.