Harmonies de la nature
First edition of the Harmonies of Nature which “foreshadow Chateaubriand and Baudelaire” (Guillaume Métayer).
3 volumes in 3 octavo volumes: I/(2) ff., LII and 456 pp., plus the portrait; II/(2) ff., 506 pp.; III/(2) ff., 616 pp.
Half red morocco, gilt and crowned cipher in the center of the covers, smooth spine decorated with gilt fleurons and double fillet. Contemporary binding.
214 x 133 mm.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri. Harmonies of Nature, by Jacques-Bernardin-Henri de Saint-Pierre; adorned with the author's portrait. Published by Louis Aimé-Martin. Following the Studies of Nature.
Paris, Méquignon-Marvis, 1815.
Rare first edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s work which foreshadows “the Baudelairean world of correspondences and universal analogy ”.
Tchemerzine, V, 654; Brunet, V, 57.
Published a few months after the author’s death, the Harmonies of Nature were conceived as the crowning achievement of the Studies, both a recapitulation of his entire work and an ambitious project aiming to unify knowledge. The undertaking, reminiscent of the spirit of the Encyclopédie, is distinguished by its rejection of the analytical and descriptive method in favor of a synthetic approach that strives to connect all elements of nature in order to grasp the harmonic relationships linking each one to all the others.
Nonetheless, what emerges is a cosmological vision that may appear delusional, yet emanates a singular poetry.
The influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is visible in the text.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre had become close to the author of the Reveries of a Solitary Walker, with whom he would go walking in the countryside, where they would have lengthy discussions about nature and the human soul.
“If he foreshadows the Chateaubriand of forests and American cataracts, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre also paves the way for an entire poetic tradition of the 19th century. First for Lamartine, who adopts from him both the idea and even the very term of ‘harmony’. Then for the author of Flowers of Evil. The exotic vein of the traveling Baudelaire, he of ‘A Former Life’, is likewise inseparable from this intuition of a universal harmony and allegory which the poet seems to have drawn from Bernardin” (Guillaume Métayer).
“We owe [Bernardin de Saint-Pierre] the introduction of many themes that inspired Romanticism. He renewed the sense of nature, focusing on the grand and the sublime. He is the source of descriptive lyricism which inspired Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Loti, and so many others.
He gave our literature new breath with his impressionist palette, vibrant with color, and with a language marked by a naturalist’s precision of vocabulary ” (En français dans le texte).
Large-margined copy, untrimmed, from the in-8 printing of the first edition – rarer and more sought after than the in-12 printing published simultaneously – bound at the time for Empress Marie-Louise with her crowned golden monogram in the center of the covers.
Eldest daughter of Francis I, Emperor of Austria, and Marie-Thérèse-Caroline-Joséphine de Bourbon, daughter of the King of the Two Sicilies, Marie-Louise, Archduchess of Austria (1791–1847), was sought in marriage by Napoleon I for reasons of state; she married him on March 11, 1810; from their union was born the King of Rome on March 20, 1811. Appointed regent in 1813, then again in 1814, she was granted, in full sovereignty upon Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814, the Duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, retaining her title of Imperial Majesty.
