Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois Doré

5 volumes octavo: I/ (2) ff., 318 pp., (1) blank f.; II/ (2) ff., 311 pp.; III/ (2) ff., 320 pp.; IV/ (2) ff., 319 pp.; V/ (2) ff., 327 pp.

Half tawny calf, spines decorated with gilt fillets, red calf title and volume labels, gilt initials at foot, sprinkled edges, marginal tears to 3 ff. not affecting the text.

Contemporary binding.

Sand, George. Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré.

Paris, Cadot, 1859.

First edition.

Copy collated according to the original edition, with replacement title pages dated 1859, a state unknown to Carteret and Clouzot.

A historical novel, Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-doré recounts a series of romantic and adventurous events set against the backdrop of religious conflicts during the reign of Louis XIII.

An old marquis belonging to the old world and his son Mario—handsome as a god and brave as a thousand knights—live in a Berry torn apart by the wars of religion. It is the 17th century, and we encounter Louis XIII, Richelieu, and the Prince of Condé. Alongside these illustrious figures, there is also Laurence the Huguenot and the enigmatic Pilar the gypsy. Which of these two women will succeed in winning Mario’s heart?

Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, who made use of the pseudonym George Sand, said: "There is nothing in me, nothing strong except the need to love." She first set love against prejudice and convention; then she made it the initiator of a new social era; finally, she celebrated it—without protest against the established order, yet with no less enthusiasm—as the very essence of happiness and even virtue.

"George Sand’s talent as a writer was one of the most spontaneous in our literature. She occupied a very significant place in 19th-century literature. She reinvented the idyll, and transformed the novel. Equally distant from the adventure novel and the purely realist novel, she achieved a middle ground that contains romance, remains truthful, and where sweet poetry and delicate sensibility have their place. This may well be the true French novel. Turgenev, George Eliot, Dostoyevsky admired her passionately" (Carteret).

"The major novels of George Sand cannot be classified in a single literary genre. Les Beaux Messieurs de Bois-Doré proves this brilliantly. It is at once a melodrama, a swashbuckler, a sentimental novel, a comedy, a pastoral, a political novel, and a religious novel—and, whatever the author says, a historical novel; let’s say above all it is a coming-of-age novel, parts of which have a dazzling, unbridled rhythm, the wit and humor of that Comedia dell’arte she knew and appreciated so well" (Daniel Arsand).

Precious copy, pure and large-margined, preserved in its period bindings.

Provenance: library of Ludovic Halévy (with ex-libris and gilt initials stamped at the tail of the volumes).

A composer and member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Ludovic Halévy (1834-1908) collaborated with the Duke of Morny, and was an editor at the Corps législatif in 1861. A dramatic author, he gave the Opéra-Comique Carmen for which Bizet wrote the music.