Adam ou la création de l'homme.

12mo of (5) ff., 93 pp. and (1) privilege page, vignette by Coypel engraved by Simonneau at the head of each canto.

Full mottled brown calf, spine with raised bands richly decorated, red morocco title labels, decorated edges, marbled edges. Contemporary binding.

168 x 100 mm.

Perrault, Charles (1628-1703). Adam, or the Creation of Man... By Mr. Perrault of the French Academy.

Paris, Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1697.

The rarest first edition of Charles Perrault published in 1697 simultaneously with theHistories or Tales of Past Times and complementing them.

Tchemerzine, V, 177.

As the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns unfolded, the four volumes of the Parallels of the Ancients and the Moderns (1688 to 1697) appeared, where Perrault presented the theoretical sum of his positions while proposing a dual parable in his reflection on the order of the world: on one hand, in spiritual form with Adam or the Creation of Man, His Fall and His Restoration… (1697), and on the other in the seemingly naive format of the Tales or Stories from Times Past (1697).

As a good courtier, and aware of the king's interest in the writers of his reign, Perrault extolled the superiority of modern authors over their predecessors. Boileau and Racine protested, with irony or with violence. Thus began the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns", which would last three long years. This struggle, which inflamed public opinion, led to discussions, public debates, and countless quarrels, and was marked by a flourishing of published works.

Perrault began with four volumes entitled Parallels of the Ancients and the Moderns, in which Boileau was justifiably outraged to see Quinault placed above Racine and the painter Lebrun above Raphael.

These tales make Charles Perrault the creator of a literary genre, previously unknown. Written for children, these stories enchanted Perrault’s contemporaries and soon became recognized as masterpieces.

"What is my Mother Goose," wrote Anatole France, "if not the grandmother of us all, and the grandmothers of our grandmothers, women with simple hearts and sinewy arms who did their daily work with humble greatness, and who, dried out by age, having, like the cicadas, neither flesh nor blood, still conversed by the fireplace under the smoke-blackened beam and told all the children of the household those long stories that made them see a thousand things?"

These "long stories" had previously been unsuccessfully attempted by others before Perrault. Our great storyteller succeeded. He gave them their concise, classic, definitive form, that of a true work of art.

Perrault is the founding father from whom, two centuries later, Meilhac and Halévy (Bluebeard), Théodore de Banville (Riquet with the Tuft), Armand Silvestre (Grisélidis), and others would draw inspiration to create prose or verse performances.

In the year 1697, Charles Perrault (1625-1703) published his two rarest first editions: Adam and Histories or Tales of Past Times.

In these two works, Perrault offers a dual parable in his reflection on the order of the world: on one hand in a spiritual form with Adam and on the other, in the apparently dark form of Histories or Tales of Past Times.

Beautiful copy with wide margins in pure period binding.

Handwritten annotation by a former owner on the endpaper: "This present book belongs to me, André Lecoeur, merchant and schoolmaster at Saint Cyr du Gault".