Poesies Composéz…A La Bastille…depuis…1702 Jusqu’au…1713.
[France], c. 1770.
4to (195 x 150 mm.). [viii], 444, [1], [3 blank]p. In a single cursive hand.
Contemporary blind-ruled speckled calf (stained, corners bumped, small hole in the rear panel), flat spine and red morocco labels gilt, green silk marker.
THIS UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT IS THE ONLY KNOWN FAIR COPY OF THESE WORKS, which have never been closely studied.
While held in the Bastille from 1702-13 on charges of espionage, Renneville composed this collection of some two hundred sonnets, acrostics, odes, epigrams and playful bouts-rimés, as well as stories, essays, fables and riddles in verse. The poems are mostly in French, some in Latin and a handful in Italian. Many address court officials and prison administrators by name or thinly veiled metaphor. Some have a key to the characters’ identities.
In the Bastille, Renneville (c. 1650-1723) manufactured his own ink and turned tiny bones salvaged from his meals into styli. He wrote between the lines and in the margins of a copy of Baillet’s 1690 Auteurs déguisez (now BnF Arsenal Ms-12728), which remained in the prison library into the 1750s, accessible to inmates with reading privileges, including Voltaire (detained 1717-8). Another political prisoner, L.A. de La Beaumelle (detained 1753 and 1756-7), smuggled the book out and accused Voltaire of plagiarizing part of the seventh Canto of his 1723 Henriade from Renneville’s Vision ou caprice (here pp. 268-371).
In good condition, from the library of G.-V. Gardin de Villers (1818-1901; purchase dated 1875).
¶See Haag’s La France Protestante IX: 415-6 and Wade’s “Voltaire and Baillet’s Manual of Pseudonyms” in Modern Language Notes 50/4 (1935) 209-15.
Price: $14,500.00