Contes de fées
Very rare first edition of the Fairy Tales by the Countess of Murat.
12mo, (4) leaves, 408 pages.
Speckled calf, ribbed spine decorated with gilt floral motifs, morocco title label, decorated edges, marbled edges. Contemporary binding.
156 x 94 mm.
Very rare first edition of the Fairy Tales by the Countess de Murat.
Original fairy tales in period bindings are highly sought after.
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Murat. Fairy Tales Dedicated to Her Serene Highness the Dowager Princess de Conty.
Paris, Claude Barbin, 1698. With Royal Privilege.
Very rare first edition of these famous fairy tales.
Brunet III, 1948; Brunet Suppl. 1129; Gumuchian, 4224 and 4225; Rahir, Bibliothèque de l’amateur, 556; Conlon, II, no. 8861; Quérard, VI, 363; Catalogue Jérôme Pichon, no. 3515.
The first collection of fairy tales by the Countess de Murat and “the best we have from her” (M. E. Storer, La Mode des contes de fées, pp. 150-151).
This volume contains the following tales: "Le Parfait Amour," "Anguillette," and "Jeune et belle."
“These Tales are written with great wit; it is known that the Countess de Murat sometimes had too much” (Quérard).
Henriette-Julie de Castelnau (1670-1716) belonged to a very illustrious family. Her father, the Marquis de Castelnau, was governor of Brest. She married the Count de Murat. She was related to Mlle de La Force. She was a modern in her literary tastes. She admired Montaigne, Fontenelle, Father Bouhours… she loved the romantic love found in the novels of Mme de Villedieu and Mme d’Aulnoy. She was a born storyteller. In Loches, she spent her evenings telling stories to her friends.
Her tales center on the theme of love. Seen by the storyteller as both inevitable and unhappy, it is reduced to the rank of a destructive passion.
In her tales, Mme de Murat seems to oscillate between idealism and cynicism.
The journal of the prolific author Henriette-Julie de Castelnau countess de Murat well illustrates the prominent role that fairy tales played in educated French society at the turn of the eighteenth century. In Murat’s time contes de fees represented a new literary genre, a site of experimentation and a form for exploring subject matters as monarchal politics. Murat may be counted among the most inventive. These early contes de fees reflected the influence of the period’s major academic literary dispute, the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. In 1688, Charles Perrault launched the debate when he delivered his treatise, the Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, at the Académie française. Perhaps the strongest voice for the Moderns’ point of view, Perrault argued that contemporary arts, letters, and sciences were nearly always superior to classical learning. Following Perrault’s lead, the Moderns embraced not only the French vernacular but also a range of progressive trends in literary production such as new genres (especially fictional ones) and authorship by non-traditionally schooled writers, including many women. For modern partisans, the best literature emerged not from solitary work in libraries stuffed with Homer and Virgil, but rather from worldly authors fully engaged in contemporary society. The fairy tale was viewed as a modern genre, and the predominance of women among the ranks of published fairy tale authors was indicative of the larger role of female writers in modern literary life as a whole.
Charles Perrault valued Mme de Murat’s talent and had dedicated one of his tales to her, inviting her to write also “innocent tales, though full of cleverness.”
All fairy tales published in 1697 and 1698 are extremely rare.
