DESMARETS DE SAINT-SORLIN, Jean. Clovis ou la France Chrétienne. Poème héroique. [34], 464 pp. Illustrated with a full-page engraved equestrian portrait of a young Louis XIV after Sébastien Bourdon, a full-page allegorical engraved frontispiece by N. Pitau after Charles Lebrun, and 26 full-page engraved plates by François Chauveau and Abraham Bosse, plus numerous intricate and elegant ornamental vignettes throughout. 4to, 250 x 180 mm, bound in French nineteenth-century straight-grained green morocco, floral and sea-shell ornaments in covers and spine panels, marbled endpapers, a.e.g.. Paris, A. Courbé, H. Le Gras, J. Roger, 1657.

Rare First Edition of one of the finest illustrated French Baroque books. The twenty-six steel engravings by François Chauveau and Abraham Bosse appear here in their first state. Fixed between decorative ornamental arabesques, these engravings transform Clovis into one of the most beautiful French books of the seventeenth century.

The four Bosse engravings after Chaveau and Bourdon are numbers 12, 15, 23 and 24. The remainder of the engraved work is by Chauveau ( Inventaire du fonds francais I, 507; II 459-61).

Jean Desmarets, Sieur de Saint Sorlin (1595-1676), connected closely with Richelieu, was a member of the small group of writers promulgating the Cardinal's literary ideas. Due to Richelieu's influence Desmarets became the first chancellor of the Academie Francaise.

In his heroic poem the author praises the founder of the French monarchy, Clovis. It was dedicated by the author to the young Louis XIV, whom Desmarets predicts will one day be called "Louis the Great" and that his fame will overtake Alexander the Great's. Desmaret wrote the poem was expressly to delineate a rupture with pagan mythology. "His long epic Clovis (1657) is noteworthy because Desmarets rejected the traditional pagan background, and maintained that Christian imagery should supplant it. With this standpoint he contributed several works in defence of the moderns in the famous quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns." He also the author of a special treatise in favour of the French language and genius, entitled "La comparaison de la langue et des la poesie francaises avec la Grecque et la Latine, et de poetes Grecs, Latins et Francais."

PROVENANCE: Émile Délicourt with his engraved ex-libris by M. Leloir. Délicourt was the author of Album du contraste simultané des couleurs d'après le système de M. Chevreul, ou Recueil d'exemples de papiers peints (1842); Albert Natural, Swiss Ambassador to China (?) with ex-libris.

Rahir, Bibliothèque de l'amateur, 398. Tchemerzine II, 831. Canivet, L'Illustration de la poésie et du roman français au XVIIe siècle, 1957, 93. Gottlieb, "Three Illustrated Works by Desmarets", in Yale University Bullentin (1958).