Les Malades de Belle de belle Humeur ou Lettres Divertissantes ecrites de Chaudray.
12mo [15.9 x 8.9 cm], (6) ff., 424 (i.e. 432) pp., with an added folding plate [26.1 x 26.1 cm]. Bound in contemporary French mottled calf, covers triple gilt ruled, spine in six compartments, red morocco title label, marbled end papers and marbled edges, engraved ex-libris of Maurice Villaret on front-end paste down. Covers and corners somewhat rubbed. Some leaves toned, an occasional spot in margin, otherwise very good.
Very rare second edition (first in 1697) of an enigmatic and ingenious literary satire devoted to the medical practice of Dr. Christophe Ozanne (1633-1713), an unlicensed rural physician from the French hamlet of Chaudray. The present volume contains a very rare, separately issued engraving depicting Ozanne consulting with patients in his modest rooms, providing a fascinating glimpse into the practice of empiric medicine in 17th-century France.
Les Malades de Belle Humeur ou Lettres Divertissantes ecrites de Chaudray, the work of the dramaturge and theologian L’abbé Laurent de Bordelon (1653-1730), ranges wildly in genre and subject matter, containing element of the epistolary novel, poetry, fictitious dialogue, art criticism, medicinal theory, and digests of classical literary works, and even prints genuine letters exchanged by two important female writers of 17th-centruy France, the famed female novelist Madeleine de Scudéry (1607-1701) and the poet Catherine Descartes (1637-1706), niece of the René. The publication of such bizarrerie during the Golden Age of French Baroque Literature – a period during which L’Académie française and the salons of Paris championed the classical ideals of rigidly self-contained and well-defined genres – is truly peculiar and offers a fascinating point of departure for further literary-historical research.
Les Malades de Belle Humeur opens with a (real or imagined) description of the author’s convalescence in the care of Ozanne, including a discussion of the doctor’s home, his patients, and his remedies. The large, separately issued folding plate depicts (with no apparent humor) Dr. Ozanne in his chambers distributing ‘curative waters’ to a queue of eager patients. Such detailed depictions of medical practice are of interest in their own right and are fairly uncommon. As we have located the plate in no other copy of the work, and it is almost certainly the ad hoc addition of an early owner (see Notice sur Christophe Ozanne, pp. 44-5).
Bordelon’s initial narrative is quickly is overtaken by the literary ephemera that makes this volume such a puzzle, not only for the heterogenous nature of its contents, but also the level of critical intelligence, which ranges from the banal to the sophisticated. We find poetry, a list of mirabilia, elementary plot summaries of Virgil and Homer, a well-informed critical appraisal of Italian vs. French music, dialogues between fictitious characters, etc. Yet the most significant of Bordelon’s digressions is not fictitious at all: the 20-page excerpt of actual correspondence between Madeleine de Scudéry and Catherine Descartes, which includes a poem by Scudéry that appears here in print for the first time. A monograph comparing the letters in the present volume to a verified manuscript of the correspondence confirms that they are genuine.
The Paris chaplain Abbé de Bordelon (1653-1730), far from a fringe figure, enjoyed considerable celebrity during his lifetime, publishing dozens of works on a variety of topics, including astrology, drama, morality, philosophy, biography and mock biography, and witchcraft. His works, including a twelve-volume collected works, were frequently reprinted in France and the Netherlands, and were also translated into English, German, Italian, and Spanish.
OCLC locates U.S. copies of this 1698 edition at Newberry and San Francisco; Penn and the Library of Congress house copies of the 1697 edition. The added engraving found in the present volume is untraced in public institutions.
* Not in Cioranescu. Van Roosbroeck, “The ‘Unpublished’ Poems of Mlle de Scudéry and Mlle Descartes,” Modern Language Notes, v. 40 no. 3 (Mar., 1925), pp. 155-158; Ramsey, Professional and Popular Medicine in France 1770-1830, p. 214; Notice sur Christophe Ozanne, médecin empirique de Chaudray, près de Mantes (1874), pp. 44-5. G. Schéfer, Catalogue des estampes, dessins, et cartes, no. 209.36, col. 732.
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