Paul et Virginie

Name: Paul et Virginie
SKU: 30088
Price: 2400 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Paris, De l'Imprimerie P. Didot l'aîné, 1806.

1 vol. (235 x 320 mm) of half-title, frontispiece, title, xcii, 194 p. and [3] f. Long-grained blue morocco, covers with borders decorated with wide blind and gilt rolls and fillets, spine richly decorated, inner roll, gilt edges (binding signed Simier R. du Roi).

The most luxurious illustrated edition of Paul et Virginie, partly original and establishing the definitive text. It is illustrated with a portrait of the author and 6 plates, engraved on copper by Bourgeois de la Richardière, Bovinet, Mecou, Prot, Ribault, Roger and Tillement.

Editions of Paul et Virginie are numerous: the novel was a bestseller from the eighteenth century onward. While the most famous edition is undoubtedly the richly illustrated Curmer edition of 1838, produced for a wide public, the most luxurious and finest edition had appeared thirty years earlier, printed by Firmin Didot in 1806 on fine Essonne paper. This edition stands in stark contrast to the Curmer: few illustrations, a very limited print run, a large format and a high price. Copies were most often luxuriously bound by the finest workshops of the period.

This edition was supervised by the author himself, who added an unpublished preamble discussing the creation of the engravings, the work of Lafitte (“Enfance de Paul et Virginie”), Girodet (“Le Passage du torrent”), Baron Gérard (“Arrivée de M. de la Bourdonnais”), Moreau le jeune (“Les Adieux de Paul et Virginie”), Isabey (“Les tombeaux”) and Prud’hon, responsible for the most celebrated of them all: “Le Naufrage de Virginie.” “How could M. Prud’hon enclose such great subjects within so small a space? Where did he find the models for these fleeting and mobile effects, which art cannot fix, and which nature herself offers us only as rapid glimpses? […] If M. Prud’hon succeeds, through the purity of his line and the elegance of his forms, in rendering deities, he interests me even more, I think, in representing mortals […]. He is, in my view, the La Fontaine of draughtsmen.”

This is the last edition published in the author’s lifetime and revised by him.

Unidentified armorial stamp on the half-title; bookplate of Joël Dupont, former curator of the Musée Barbey d’Aurevilly.

A fine copy, very fresh.

Cohen, 993; P. Thoinet, “Répertoire bibliographique et iconographique de Paul et Virginie,” Bulletin du bibliophile, no. 41, 1961, p. 167 (“nothing equals the nobility of this quarto composition […] It is, in my opinion, a very fine achievement of the art of the book.”)

#30088

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