Offered is a custom-bound antique leather book collection - French Age of Enlightenment, volumes include (2) Drama, (2) Fairy Tales & (5) Novels. 3972 Total Pp. 12mo. Each book is 1/4 black leather hardcover, gilt title/compartmentalized spine covers, marble boards, matched marble endpapers and leaf edges. Individual descriptions below specify details; e.g. publication date, edition, and illustrations, etc.
Dimensions: .75-1.25 each (9 overall) W x 4.5 D x 6.75-7 H inches.
Approx. weight: 8 pounds.
Language: French.
DRAMA:
Title: Theatre.
Author: Pierre Corneille (1606-1684).
Publisher: Garnier Freres, Libraires-Editeurs.
Edition: Nouvelle Edition.
Publication date: n.d.
Origin: Paris.
Description: 502 p.
About the author and work: Corneille was a French tragedian. He is generally considered one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists, along with Molière and Racine.
As a young man, he earned the valuable patronage of Cardinal Richelieu, who was trying to promote classical tragedy along formal lines, but later quarrelled with him, especially over his best-known play, Le Cid, about a medieval Spanish warrior, which was denounced by the newly formed Académie françaisefor breaching the unities. He continued to write well-received tragedies for nearly forty years.
The book is a collection of his dramatic works; e.g. Le Cid, Horace, Cinna.
Title: Theatre Complet de J. Racine.
Author: Jean-Baptiste Racine (1639-1699). M. Auger.
Publisher: Librairie de Firmin Didot Freres, Fils et Cie.
Publication date: 1863
Origin: Paris.
Description: 663 p. Frontispiece.
About the author and work: Racine was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western tradition and world literature. The book introduces the works with a biographical excerpt, then follows with a collection of dramatic works.
FAIRY TALES:
Title: Contes de Fees.
Author(s): Claude Perrault (1628-1703), de Mme D’Aulnoy, et de Mme Leprince de Beaumont.
Illustrator: Bertall, Beauce, etc.
Publisher: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie.
Publication date: 1863.
Origin: Paris.
Description: 405 p. Illustrated with 65 vignettes.
About the author(s) and work: Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was a member of the Académie Française and a leading intellectual of his time. Ironically, his dialogue Parallèles des anciens et des modernes (Parallels between the Ancients and the Moderns), 1688-1697, which compared the authors of antiquity unfavorably to modern writers, served as a forerunner for the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, an era that was not always receptive to tales of magic and fantasy.
The work is a collection of fairy tales by Perrault and two of his contemporaries.
Title: Fables de Florian.
Author: Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755-1794).
Illustrator: Battaille.
Publisher: Bernardin - Bechet.
Publication date: 1852.
Origin: Paris.
Description: 208 p. Frontispiece, illustrated text.
About the author and work: Florian was a French poet, novelist and fabulist. To later readers, Florian was chiefly known as the author of pretty fables well suited as reading for the young, but his contemporaries praised him also for his poetical and pastoral novels. Florian was very fond of Spain and its literature, doubtless owing to the influence of his Castilian mother, and both abridged and imitated the works of Cervantes. (Wiki)
NOVELS:
Title: Caracteres de La Bruyere suivis des Caracteres de Theophphraste.
Author: Jean de La Bruyere (1645-1696). Traduits du Grec par la Bruyere avec des notes et des additions par Schweighaeuser.
Publisher: Librairie de Firmin Didot Freres, Fils et Cie.
Publication date: 1861.
Origin: Paris.
Description: 528 p. Frontispiece.
About the author and work: de La Bruyere was a French philosopher and moralist, who was noted for his satire. Of note, he served Louis, Prince of Conde (1621-1686), and profited by the inclination that the entire Conde family had for the society of men of letters. The plan of the book Caractères used the treatise of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus (successor to Aristotle) as a concept, thought the novel is thoroughly original. The short paragraphs of which his chapters consist are made up of maxims proper, of criticisms literary and ethical, and above all, of the celebrated sketches of individuals baptized with names taken from the plays and romances of the time. (Wiki).
Title: L’Amour.
Author: Jules Michelet (1798-1874).
Publisher: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie.
Edition: First Edition.
Publication date: 1858.
Origin: Paris.
Description: 414 p.
About the author and work: Jules Michelet was a French historian and writer. He is best known for his multivolume work Histoire de France (History of France), which traces the history of France from the earliest times to the French Revolution. He is considered one of the founders of modern historiography.
“…The book was merely Michelet’s attempt to establish reverence for the physical life of woman. Her intellectual life was considered only as a kind of appendage to the physical. Michelet apparently had no other conception of woman and her destiny than as maiden, wife, mother, housekeeper. ... He saw about him not a nation of families, but of individuals. He wished to hold before his countrymen an ideal of family life. ... Its conception of love, though one-sided, was sufficiently in advance of contemporary thought on the subject to render the book remarkable."--C.D. Warner.
Title: Don Quichotte de la Manche.
Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). Traduit de L’Espanol par Florian.
Publisher: Librairie de Firmin Didot Freres, Fils et Cie.
Publication date: 1863.
Origin: Paris.
Description: 498 p.
About the author and work: Cervantes was an early Modern Spanish writer widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language and one of the world's pre-eminent novelists. He is best known for his novel Don Quixote, a work often cited as both the first modern novel and "the first great novel of world literature". (Wiki)
Title: Graziella.
Author: Alphonse de Lamartine.
Publisher: Michel Levy Freres, Librairie-Editeurs.
Edition: Nouvelle Edition. Collection Michel Levy.
Publication date: 1860.
Origin: Paris.
Description: 245 p.
About the work and author: The novel tells of a young French man who falls for a fisherman's granddaughter – the eponymous Graziella – during a trip to Naples, Italy; they are separated when he must return to France, and she soon dies. Based on the author's experiences with a tobacco-leaf folder while in Naples in the early 1810s, Graziella was first written as a journal and intended to serve as commentary for Lamartine's poem "Le Premier Regret" (Goodreads)
Title: Le Rouge et le Noir – Chronique du XIXe Siecle.
Author: de Stendhal (Henry Beyle).
Publisher: Michel Levy Freres, Librairie-Editeurs.
Edition: Seule Edition Complete.
Publication date: 1862.
Description: 509 p.
About the author and work: Stendhal is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. The novel, set in France during the Second Restoration (1815–30), is a powerful character study of Julien Sorel, an ambitious young man who uses seduction as a tool for advancement. The Red and the Black is generally considered the author’s major work and one of the greatest 19th-century novels. (Wiki)