Les Caractères de Théophraste,… dixième édition,…

This edition was published three years after La Bruyère’s death; it reproduces the text of the ninth edition of 1696, the last version revised by the author and regarded as definitive. According to Claudin, despite its Paris imprint, this tenth edition was probably printed in Lyon.

First published in 1688, the Caractères met with immediate success. La Bruyère continually reworked, corrected and above all expanded his book: from 418 remarks in the first edition, it grew to more than 1,100 in the last. The translation of Theophrastus’s thirty characters is thus matched by a vast portrait of contemporary manners, bringing together courtiers, magistrates, financiers, the devout, pedants, flatterers and the ambitious.

A copy bearing the arms of Pierre-Daniel Huet: “azure, two ermine spots argent in chief and three bells reversed or in base.”

Born in Caen in 1630, Huet was one of the great scholars of the reign of Louis XIV. A philologist, theologian, historian, philosopher and man of science, he served as sub-tutor to the Grand Dauphin, for whom he directed the celebrated series of classical authors ad usum Delphini. Elected to the Académie française in 1674, he became Bishop of Avranches in 1692. His Traité de l’origine des romans is among the first great French essays devoted to the history of the novel as a genre.

His library, comprising several thousand volumes, was both that of a bibliophile and that of a scholar, with theology, philosophy, literature, ancient languages and the sciences occupying a major place. Huet generally had his books bound in fawn or brown calf, with his arms stamped at the center of the covers. A large part of this library, bequeathed to the professed house of the Jesuits in Paris, later entered the collections of the Bibliothèque royale.

Some early minor restorations, otherwise a good copy.