CHARLES PERRAULT

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• Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle: Avec leurs portraits au naturel
  
  2 vols. bound in one; Paris: Antoine Dezallier 1696–1700
  
  

  first edition, first issue with the biographies and portraits of Antoine Arnauld (vol. 2, pp. 15–16) and Blaise Pascal (vol. 2, pp. 65–66) that were suppressed by the censors in the second issue and replaced with those of Louis Thomassin and Charles du Fresne du Cange; this copy has all four portraits with their accompanying texts (pp. 15f. and 65f. in vol. 2 are hence counted twice)

  engraved allegorical title-page in vol. 1, the vignettes and tailpieces engraved by Sébastien Leclerc (1637–1714) and the woodcut headpieces by Pierre Le Sueur (1669–1750); overall the book contains 102 engraved plates by Claude Duflos (1665–1727), Gérard Edelinck
  (1640–1707), Jacques Lubin (ca. 1659–after 1703), Robert Nanteuil (1623–1678), Pieter Louis van Schuppen (1627–1702), and Louis Simonneau (1654–1727); five plates are unsigned

  sheets 424 x 275 mm (16 ⅝ x 11 inches)

  fine nineteenth-century green-leather binding by René Victor Chambolle (1834–1898) and Hippolyte Duru (d. 1884) with their stamp “Chambolle-Duru” inside front cover provenance Jacques Vieillard, Bordeaux (his book label inside front cover); his sale, André Desvouges with experts Francisque Lefrançois and Marcel Mounastre-Picamilh, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, March 12–15, 1929, lot 271 Raphaël Esmérian, New York (his book label inside front cover but not in his sales with experts Georges Blaizot and Claude Guérin, Palais Galliera, Paris, 1972–74; however, a file card for this book is in the Esmérian papers kept at the Grolier Club in New York)

  Charles Perrault is today best known for establishing the Contes de Fées (Fairy Tales) in French literature. The two main collections, Contes en vers and Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités, were published in 1695 and 1697 respectively. Perrault came from a wealthy Parisian family, studied law, and made a career under Louis XIV and his powerful finance minister, Jean
  Baptiste Colbert. He used his influence to have his brother chosen over Gian Lorenzo Bernini as the architect for a new east wing of the Louvre, built between 1667 and 1670.

  In 1668, Perrault wrote La Peinture to honor the king’s first painter, Charles Le Brun. His treatise
  Critique de l’Opéra of 1674 instigated the literary debate known today as the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” (Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns). Perrault was the leading supporter of the “Moderns,” claiming superiority for the science but also for the literature and art of his time over that of antiquity. This position represented an open attack on the French Academy and the Academy of Painting. For the latter, ancient art was the standard against which all contemporary work must be judged. Perrault summarized his position in a series of dialogues that each compare “old” and “new.” Ultimately, they made up the four volumes of the Parallèles des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences published between 1688 and 1698. However, the positions taken by the different parties were often somewhat confusing. “Perrault, who was a skillful controversialist, pointed to Lebrun and Racine, the two stoutest supporters of the ancients, as the examples of contemporary artists who had excelled these very ancients. In the same way he maintained that Louis XIV was himself a proof that kings were as great in the seventeenth century as they had been in antiquity” (Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, 4th ed., Harmondsworth 1980, p. 360).

  Perrault’s Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle has to be seen within the context of this ongoing debate and his effort to elevate the culture of his time over all that came before; accordingly he states in his preface “comme le siècle où nous vivons … a vû toutes les Sciences & tous les arts s’élever en quelque sorte à leur derniere perfection.” Yet Blunt’s remarks serve as a warning that the illustrious contemporaries who should be included in any such list are not always obvious. While it is not surprising, therefore, that the selection provoked controversy it is probably fair to say that any selection would have created the same result. The two volumes, here, as often, bound into one, assemble the engraved portraits together with two-page long descriptions,
  printed in letterpress, of the lives and merits of eminent Frenchmen who lived under the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. At least two in the second volume of 1700, Antoine Arnauld and Blaise Pascal, roused the censors and were consecutively suppressed and then replaced by
  those of Louis Thomassin and Charles du Fresne du Cange in a second printing.

  Arnauld was the most influential representative of Jansenism in the second half of the seventeenth century. This theological movement within the Catholic Church emphasized human depravity and the necessity of divine grace and was opposed to many elements of the Catholic hierarchy, most notably the Jesuit order. The mathematician and Christian philosopher Pascal was also a follower; once the Jesuit controversy had forced Arnauld into hiding he took up his cause by writing a series of polemic letters. They were collected and published anonymously under the title Provinciales in 1657 in Cologne. The suppression of both portraits is evidence that the impact of
  these Jansenist debates lingered as late as 1700.

  It is not without irony then—and possibly representing a sly move by Perrault the “controversialist”— that one of the two “substitutes,” Louis Thomassin, had been attacked by the Jansenists when teaching at the Sorbonne. He retreated from public life soon after to write, among other things, a comprehensive history of canon law. The other, Charles du Fresne, was a highly distinguished philologist and an important early historian of the Middle Ages and editor of the writings of Byzantine historians—in this respect a safe choice for inclusion.

  The bulk of the portraits in volume one were engraved by Gérard Edelinck (33), whom our trusted Thomas Head Thomas calls “the greatest of the followers of Nanteuil, and the foremost engraver in France in the last part of the XVIIth century” (Thomas Head Thomas, French Portrait Engraving of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, London 1910, p. 67). Thomas even suggests that “his technical accomplishments … are more varied than Nanteuil’s” but has to concede that “his lines are never as direct, as expressive;—he uses more lines with less result” (ibid., p. 69).

  The majority of the plates in the second volume were engraved by Jacques Lubin (31). Lubin was a pupil of Edelinck but it must be admitted that his portraits do not quite hold up to his teacher’s standards.

• Les Hommes illustres qui ont paru en France pendant ce siècle: Avec leurs portraits au naturel
  
  2 vols. bound in one; Paris: Antoine Dezallier 1696–1700

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