PRAYERBOOK BY A GAMBLING HOUSE HOSTESS – PRINTED AT THE LOUVRE
[SAVOY-CARIGNAN, Maria Vittoria Francesca, Princess of.]
Recueil de prières et de pratiques très utils pour se conduire à Dieu dans tous les exercices de la vie chrétienne. Avec l’ordinaire de la Messe, l’Office de la Ste. Vierge, l’Office des morts, les vêpres du dimanche et du St. Sacrement. Et les Petits Offices de la Conception, du St. Sacrement et de St. Joseph.
[Paris, Imprimerie Royale], 1735.
4to, pp. [2 (blank)], [2], 8, [4], 9–489, [3 (index)]; title within elaborate typographic border enclosing the Savoy crest at head, typographic headpieces and woodcut tailpieces; sporadic light spotting, lightly toned (as usual), but overall a beautiful copy; bound in contemporary brown morocco, raised bands, gilt morocco lettering-piece to spine, turn-ins gilt, gilt floral brocade endpapers, edges gilt over marbling, three green silk place-markers; boards slightly spotted, slight wear to joints; long contemporary manuscript additions to pp. 413, 415, and 416; contemporary ownership inscription of count Nicolas de La Roche-Aymon to title and verso of rear free endpaper; nineteenth-century bookplate of Jean Buffet to front pastedown, nineteenth-century visiting card of Mr et Mme Aimé Buffet, with manuscript bibliographical note to verso, loosely inserted.
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Recueil de prières et de pratiques très utils pour se conduire à Dieu dans tous les exercices de la vie chrétienne. Avec l’ordinaire de la Messe, l’Office de la Ste. Vierge, l’Office des morts, les vêpres du dimanche et du St. Sacrement. Et les Petits Offices de la Conception, du St. Sacrement et de St. Joseph.
First and only edition of this rare prayerbook, compiled by the notorious gambling house hostess and spy Maria Vittoria Francesca of Savoy-Carignan (1690–1766), elegantly printed in a very limited number at the royal press set up at the Louvre.
The daughter of Victor Amadeus II, King of Sardinia and his favourite mistress, Jeanne Baptiste d’Albert de Luynes, Maria Vittoria Francesca was later legitimised by her father and married to prince Victor Amadeus of Savoy-Carignan. Oppressed by the debts racked up by her husband, the couple escaped to Paris in 1718, taking up residence at the Hôtel de Soissons, which they soon turned into one of the most notorious gambling houses in the French capital. The couple led a scandalous lifestyle, with Maria Vittoria forging close relationships with various powerful men, particularly Cardinal Fleury and Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon, reporting intelligence to her father while her husband continued to amass large debts. Following the death of her husband in 1740, Maria Vittoria led a quieter and more retiring widowhood and succeeded in marrying off her only surviving daughter, Princess Anna Teresa of Savoy-Carignan, to the widowed Charles de Rohan, Prince of Soubise, one of the most celebrated French book collectors of his time.
Even before Louis XIV moved the Court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre had long been a hub of artistic, creative, and intellectual energy in Paris; the first printing workshop had appeared in the Louvre in the 1620s, and the Imprimerie Royale was established there in 1640 by Cardinal Richelieu. Artists and artisans of all trades – from watchmakers to history painters – were given lodgings and studio space in the same wings and corridors that accommodated cultural organs like the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for state festivities and spectacles), the royal printing press, and the royal academies (Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Inscriptions, Science, and the Académie Française). As the palace expanded over the next two centuries, the Louvre complex (the building and surrounding streets) came to be dominated by this growing community of artists, artisans, men of letters, and their aristocratic patrons, living and working together.
OCLC records four copies only, two of which outside France, at the University of Dayton in the US, and the University of Sydney in Australia. No copies recorded on Library Hub.
Bernard, Histoire de l’imprimerie royale du Louvre (1867), p. 175; Conlon, Le siècle des Lumières, 35, 323.
