Annotazioni sopra il vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca

This work, cited twice in one of Montesquieu’s working notebooks (preserved at the Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux, Ms 1867, 445n and 507n), is by Alessandro Tassoni, secretary to Cardinal Colonna and later to the Duke of Savoy. This erudite scholar possessed extraordinarily wide-ranging knowledge of physics, geography, history and literature.

The copy is above all a witness to one of the most extraordinary forgery affairs in history: the mathematician Michel Chasles was the naive and unfortunate victim of the forger Denis Vrain-Lucas, who sold him all manner of incredible documents, purportedly autograph letters from Socrates to Euclid; from Cleopatra to Julius Caesar (Cleopatra wishing to send Caesarion to Marseille, where the air was good and the teaching excellent); from Gregory of Tours to the former queen Radegund, then in her convent at Poitiers (recounting the Vase of Soissons to instruct her nuns); from Charles Martel to the Duke of the Moors; from Alcuin to Charlemagne; from Héloïse to Abélard; from Joan of Arc to her parents; from Charles V to François Rabelais; from Pascal to Queen Christina of Sweden; from Archimedes to Hieron; from Alexander the Great, King of Macedon, to Aristotle; from Thales, sage of Greece, to Prince Ambigat, King of the Gauls; as well as a safe-conduct from Vercingetorix for Pompey, a letter from Lazarus risen from the dead to Saint Peter, from Mary Magdalene to Lazarus, from Saint Eligius to Dagobert, and so on.

Over sixteen years, Vrain-Lucas forged more than 27,000 autographs, letters, documents and manuscripts, on leaves or within books, attributed to 660 historical figures ranging from classical Antiquity to the Age of Enlightenment, almost all of them sold to the great mathematician Michel Chasles. Following the trial of 1870, the 27,320 forged autographs sold to Chasles by Vrain-Lucas were destroyed, with the exception of a small number offered by the experts Bordier and Mabille, “with the permission of the judicial authorities,” to the manuscripts department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. These were bound together in a single volume of 180 leaves. A few other surviving pieces are held by the Musée de la Police.

Vrain-Lucas had also “supplied” Chasles with a number of books bearing prestigious “provenances,” all of which are now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: Torquato Tasso, Aminta, the “Corneille” copy; Clavis philosophiae naturalis, the “Newton” copy; Lettres de Descartes, “annotated” by the author; Scudéry, Arminius, “annotated” by the author; Erasmus, De Duplici copia verborum, the “Rabelais” copy; Institutiones linguae graecae, the “Rabelais” copy; Le Voyage de Me Guillaume, the “Molière” copy; Les Intrigues de la lotterie, the “Molière” copy; Guisiade, Tragédie, the “Molière” copy; Du Bellay’s Le Premier livre des antiquitez de Rome, the “Montaigne” copy; Cinque canti di Camillo Camilli, the “Galileo” copy; De Monstrorum caussis, the “Galileo” copy; Il Petrarca spirituale, the “Galileo” copy, with notes — with the exception of another du Bellay (Les Regrets, 1565, “Montaigne” bookplate), preserved in the Montaigne collection at the University of Cambridge.

To our knowledge, this copy is the only Vrain-Lucas “relic” to have appeared on the market in several decades — and the only Vrain-Lucas forgery within a book in private hands. No other copy is recorded apart from the Cambridge copy and those held at the BnF.

Early restorations to the title page; a few leaves creased.

The blank half-title leaf is missing. Bookplate of Michel Chasles on the front pastedown, previously torn.