A Paris, chez Guillaume de Luyne, Libraire Juré, au Palais, en la Galerie des Merciers, 1682. Avec Privilège du Roy.
Part 1: engraved frontispiece, portrait of Corneille, xcviij pp. (including title), (1) l. for the title of Mélite, 586 pp. and (1) l. for the Privilege. The portrait of Corneille bears no signature; it depicts the poet in the costume of the early years of Louis XIV’s reign: wig, skullcap and flap.
Part 2: engraved frontispiece, cx pp., (1) l. for the title of Le Cid, 597 pp., (1) p. for the Privilege.
There are two kinds of copies of this IInd Part; some have 597 pp. and contain an Extract of the Privilege on the verso of p. 597; others have 596 pp. only and the Extract of the Privilege occupies the recto of the next leaf. This difference is due to the fact that, during the printing process, Corneille deleted twenty lines from scene V of the fifth act of Théodore (p. 587). Sheet Bb, the last in the volume, has thus undergone a complete overhaul.
Part 3 : engraved frontispiece, lxxxiv pp. and (1) l. for the title of Rodogune, 618 pp. and (1) l. for the Privilege.
Part 4: engraved frontispiece, xxij pp. and (1) f. for the title of Sertorius, 591 pp. and (1) l. for the Privilege.
4 volumes 12mo bound in fawn calf, ribbed spines, two weak joints, red edges. Contemporary binding from the workshop of Jean Le Vasseur, bookbinder to King Louis XIV.
Ref : Bibl. R. Esmérian, Paris, December 8, 1972, n° 63).
151 x 85 mm.
Definitive original edition of Pierre Corneille’s Theatre. (E. Picot, Bibliographie cornélienne, n° 113).
- Picot, Bibliographie cornélienne, n° 113 (”… gives us the definitive text adopted by him. It is therefore of great importance and deserves to be sought after, perhaps even more than the previous three… It is very difficult to find complete copies with all the frontispieces“); Dubos (M.), Corneille, Rouen, 1993, n°56 (for a copy bearing the arms of the Grande Mademoiselle).
It offers the definitive text, reviewed and adopted by the author and was shared between Guillaume de Luyne, Etienne Loyson and Pierre Trabouillet.
A precious copy from the very first issue.
It contains 20 verses in Act V, Scene V of “Théodore” in Part II, which Corneille deleted in the second issue.
An exceptional copy preserved in a very elegant contemporary fawn calf binding with richly decorated spines, complete with all frontispieces. This first issue copy challenges the theory of the Daguin catalog, which claimed that only second-issue copies had the frontispieces.
In fact, E. Picot was right to demand frontispieces for first-issue copies, and to claim that these were extremely rare complete.
A copy complete with the 4 frontispieces of this precious edition, bound in the 19th century by Chambolle-Duru, but from the second issue, sold for 95,000 F (€ 14,500) in 1989. (Catalogue “Du Moyen-Age au cubisme”, n°102) 35 years ago.
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![Le Théâtre de P. Corneille. Reveu et corrigé par l’Autheur. I. [II. III. Et IV] Partie. - Image 5](https://www.camillesourget.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Frontispice-3-scaled.jpg)
![Le Théâtre de P. Corneille. Reveu et corrigé par l’Autheur. I. [II. III. Et IV] Partie. - Image 6](https://www.camillesourget.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Frontispice-4-scaled.jpg)
