Les Aventures de Télémaque
Portrait of Fénelon after Vivien, engraved by Gaucher, and 24 plates by Quéverdo engraved by Dambrun, Delignon, Delaunay, Gaucher and Villerey.
Bound separately and included with the volumes: the rare suite of the pure etchings, before all lettering, by Quéverdo, with full margins, bound in half-percaline with corner pieces.
A didactic novel by Fénelon, probably written during 1694 and the following years, Les Aventures de Télémaque was first published — without the author’s knowledge — in 1699. It was read as a satire of the reign of Louis XIV, the arrogant Prince Idomeneus being a particularly evocative image of the Sun King. This implicit critique of royal absolutism was immediately understood as a transparent manifesto in favor of natural law over divine right.
The novel met with immediate success and remained, for two centuries, from 1699 to 1914, one of the most frequently reprinted and widely read books in all of French literature, “so extensively translated across Europe that an exact count of its translations has yet to be made.” Its diffusion was such that it served as a tool for learning the French language, with numerous bilingual editions, including foreign ones: “thus, in the German-speaking world, numerous versions translated into Italian or English of Fénelon’s novel were published, with an evident aim of language learning (…). Télémaque was, historically, in 1726, the first book published in English on German soil, and it was also the first novel to be translated into Turkish, published in 1862” (Nathalie Ferrand, Les circulations européennes du roman français, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010).
An identical edition was printed in 1797, in the same format, with the same collation, and again by Pierre Didot, but with engravings by Lefebvre, clearly less appealing and sought after.
From the libraries of A. Gransire and then Paul Eudel (bookplate).
Paul Eudel was a collector, art critic and dramatist; armorial bookplate with the motto In Procellis impavidae [Fearless amid storms]. His library was dispersed at public sale in 1898 and 1913.
Cohen, 388–389; see Dr J. P. Fontaine’s blog, 17 May 2019: “Le Tite-Live de l’Hôtel des Ventes.”