[Le Miroir] Mercure de France

12mo, 216 pp., 2 engraved music plates.
Red morocco, triple gilt fillet border on covers, gilt armorial stamp at center, raised bands on spine decorated with fleurs-de-lys, gilt fillet on board edges, Augsburg block-printed paper endpapers, gilt edges. Contemporary binding.

161 x 94 mm.

[Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de. Le Miroir] Mercure de France.
Paris, Chaubert, January 1755.

Contains Le Miroir by Marivaux “which deserves to be appreciated at its true value as a synthesis of Modern ideas”.

Le Miroir appeared in January 1755 and is probably based on a reading given by Marivaux at the Académie française on April 4, 1748, entitled Reflections in the Form of a Letter on the Human Mind. 
Marivaux takes as his starting point Perrot d’Ablancourt’s translation of Thucydides. He criticizes the famous translator’s “belle infidèle” for robbing “the history of the human mind” and thus argues for a literal translation that restores to the modern reader “the turn of mind people had [in the time of Thucydides]” (JOD, p.459).
From this remark, Marivaux describes the growth of the “stock of ideas” available to men throughout history. 
Through a curious allegorical fiction, Marivaux uses the device of a mirror to show some of the productions of the human mind from Homer to Helvétius. 
“Straddling two centuries,” to use Mario Matucci’s phrase, the writer returns to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, which was not yet completely over, but less for a polemical purpose than to invite his contemporaries to beware of the “prestige of distance.” As in the previous discourse, and with remarkable consistency since his earliest “disguised” novels, he champions the continuous progress of the human mind and the necessity of considering the Ancients “in their time” and at their “true value.” 
In the form of a letter addressed to “Monsieur”, the author promises “somewhat unusual adventures” that first take the form of an imaginary journey. The “curious” spectacle thus ultimately presented is that of the history of the human mind, that “spectacle which would be new to us” (JOD, p.460) which Perrot d’Ablancourt had deprived his readers of in his “Reflections on Thucydides.”
The interest of Le Miroir lies in its ability to seize at a single glance the productions of the mind “from the worst fairy tale to the most ingeniously imagined ancient and modern systems; from the dullest writer to the author of the Worlds” (p. 535). Le Miroir thus abolishes distances, in both spatial and temporal terms, and allows one to place fairy tales and philosophical systems, Chapelain and Fontenelle, Homer and Voltaire, on the same level.
By its subject—the survey of human productions since Antiquity—by its two-part, mirror-like form, and by its aim: to invite his contemporaries to a fair appraisal of works, Le Miroir is also a new parallel of the Ancients and the Moderns.
Marivaux clearly defends the modern conception of a linear history made up of a succession of new ideas, which “enrich”, “feed”, “increase” the “stock of ideas” that constitutes the human mind.
After denying the “alleged weakening of the human mind” proclaimed by the Ancients, the discourse closes on the following principle: “the growth of the mind is an infallible consequence of the world’s duration,” repeated in the penultimate paragraph of the speech: “the increase of ideas is an infallible consequence of the duration of the world,” a discourse whose last words are “the stock of the human mind keeps growing among men” (p. 549). It is thus a matter of very clearly affirming a linear progression, even if it is infinitesimal, of history—especially in opposition to Perrault, who claimed that perfection had been reached in the “century” of Louis XIV. The repetition of the phrase “the duration of the world” seems to respond directly to this illustrious former Modern.

Le Miroir also deserves to be appreciated at its true value, as a synthesis of the ideas of the Moderns and a dialogue across temporal boundaries with the great minds from Antiquity to the eighteenth century.
(Christelle Bahier-Porte. “Un pur jeu d’esprit”: the history of the human mind according to Le Miroir de Marivaux (1755). Genand, Stéphanie and Poulouin, Claudine. Parcours dissidents au XVIIIe siècle : la marge et l’écart, Desjonquères, 2011, L’Esprit des lettres).

Very beautiful copy preserved in its fine period morocco binding with the arms of King Louis XV.