VIDEL, Louis - Le Melante du Sieur Videl, secretaire de Mons - Lot 195

VIDEL, Louis - Le Melante du Sieur Videl, secretaire de Monseigneur le Connestable. Amoureuses avantures du temps. Paris, Samuel Thiboust, 1624. pet. in-8, (12) ff. (incl. frontispiece), 1015 pp. trimmed short at head with occasional damage to running title, upper part of frontispiece missing by about 5 mm, paper a little yellowed, few russets, fawn calf a little post, supralibros St PORT on boards in gilt letters, ornate ribbed spine, lion on tail, small tear on upper headpiece. BRUNET V, 1183 (''rare''). LEVER 262. First edition, dedicated to Marshal de Créquy. Videl was born in Serres, Hautes-Alpes, around 1598. He was secretary to the Duc de Lesdiguières (from 1628 until the duke's death in 1638), whose history he published in 1638. He complained that his demanding secretarial duties did not prevent him from living happily and lavishly. His biographer Chorier (Vita Boessatii, p. 188) reports that he played the lute, enjoyed dancing and appearing at ballets, dined well and paraded around provincial towns, following in his master's footsteps, mounted on a magnificently harnessed horse, covered with sumptuous covers. For Coulet (p.153), the Mélante is a pastoral novel inspired to the point of being a copy of the Astrée. In Crete, and especially in Cyprus, in an eternal springtime, shepherds venerate honest love, and are scandalized by the mockery of the incredulous Mélante and the light-hearted Célymon, who are copied from Hylas. But the fact remains that Videl's novel is, before Clélie, the text that best demonstrates the effort of analysis to grasp the different causes from which love proceeds (p. 72), where he distinguishes between the love that is born of beauty, that which is born of inclination or obligation, or gentleness, or kindness, or accortise", or pity. It heralds the famous carte du Tendre (Magendie, p. 317). The frontispiece, featuring the characters as they travel through the various episodes of the novel on a pictorial map, prefigures the sentimental geography made fashionable by Clélie. Possibly supralibros of Jean-Baptiste Gluck (1674-1748) baron de Saint-Port. Ex-libris Rob. de Billy.