On Pink Paper, Inscribed to a Woman Travel Writer
[REVILLIOD, Gustave.]
Le Cousin l’Abbé. Geneva, Jules-Guillaume Fick, 1886.
[Offered with:] [—.] Le Vieux Troupier. Geneva, Jules-Guillaume Fick, 1886.
Two works, 12mo, Le Cousin l’Abbé: pp. [4 (blank)], 145, [3], with frontispiece portrait; Le Vieux Troupier: [2 (blank)], 106, [4 (blank)], with frontispiece portrait; with half-titles; printed on pink paper, with historiated initials, printer’s device to title-pages; some scattered light foxing (particularly to first and last leaves), otherwise very good copies; uniformly bound in early twentieth-century sheep, borders roll-tooled in gilt, spines gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, marbled endpapers, with striped ribbon place-markers, printed wrappers bound in; spines a little rubbed, slight worming to hinges; ink inscriptions ‘Madame Beck-Bernard. | Souvenirs affectueux | G. R.’ (Le Vieux Troupier) and ‘souvenirs affectueux | G. R.’ (Le Cousin l’Abbé) to preliminary blanks, a few ink corrections to Le Cousin l’Abbé, subsequent armorial bookplate of Edouard de Bavier to front pastedowns (see below).
First editions of two rare works by the Genevan writer and art-collector Gustave Revilliod, printed on pink paper and inscribed by the author to his fellow writer and traveller Lina Beck-Bernard.
A celebrated antiquarian and art-collector who founded the Musée Ariana in Geneva in 1877, Revilliod (1817–1890) spent much of his inherited fortune on his far-flung travels across North Africa and Asia. He had a varied literary career as a fiction writer, historian, translator, and editor of significant historic publications including those of Calvin and Beza, notably collaborating with the publisher Jules-Guillaume Fick on many of his projects. Le Cousin l’Abbé and Le Vieux troupier are light-hearted memoires, both published anonymously: Le Cousin l’Abbé a memoir of his own family, Le Vieux troupier of Pierre Dentand, a Napoleonic-era soldier serving as valet de chambre to the author’s grandmother.
Provenance:
1. Inscribed to the traveller, writer, and journalist Lina Beck-Bernard (née Bernard, 1824–1888). Born in Alsace, Beck-Bernard moved to Basel and then to Lausanne, where she studied penal law; in 1857 she travelled to Argentina with her husband Charles Beck, administrator of Beck and Herzog, an agency organizing the migration of Swiss settlers to South America, leading to the establishment of the colony of San Carlos in 1858. She wrote widely, including the influential works on penal law Sur la peine de mort (1868) and Mémoire sur les prisons de femmes (1869) and a diary of her experience moving to Santa Fe, which formed the basis of Le Río Paraná: Cinq années de séjour dans la République Argentine (1864) and Fleurs des Pampas, Scènes et souvenirs du désert argentin (1872).
2. Édouard de Bavier, a silk merchant from Zurich who served as Consul General of Denmark in Japan. He married Hélène de Bavier (née Beck), the youngest daughter of Beck-Bernard, born during the family’s stay in Santa Fe.
No copies traced outside Continental Europe. OCLC finds a single copy of Le Cousin l’Abbé at the Argauer Kantonbibliothek, to which CCFr adds another at Grenoble, and none of Le Vieux troupier.