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Author: M. de Lescure. With fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Mlle L’Héritier, Mme d’Aulnoy, Mlle de La Force, the Comte de Caylus, Mme Leprince de Beaumont and others.
Title: Le Monde enchanté. Choix de douze contes de fées, précédé d’une Histoire des fées et de la littérature féerique en France.
Publisher: Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot et Cie, Imprimeurs de l’Institut, 1883.
Edition: 1883 edition.
Language: French.
Pages: lxxx, 432 pages.
Size: 9.5 x 6.5 inches.
Binding: Very good to near fine full red morocco binding, beautifully executed with five raised bands, richly gilt ornamental spine compartments and gilt lettering. Boards decorated with elegant blind-stamped concentric panels and ruled borders. All edges gilt. Attractive pale moiré-patterned endpapers. Binding firm, bright and exceptionally well preserved, with only minimal signs of age and handling. Protected in a removable mylar cover.
Content: Very good condition. Complete and firmly bound, with clean, well-preserved pages showing only occasional light spotting and age toning. Includes a tissue-guarded frontispiece. The volume contains an extensive introductory Histoire des fées et de la littérature féerique en France, followed by twelve celebrated fairy tales including La Belle au Bois dormant, Cendrillon, Le Petit-Poucet, L’Oiseau Bleu, La Chatte Blanche, La Belle et la Bête and others.
Illustrations: Illustrated with 37 engravings after drawings by A. Gaillard, including full-page plates and smaller illustrations throughout, depicting the enchanted landscapes, supernatural figures, princesses and dramatic episodes of the tales.Estimate: $250–350 USD.
The book:
Le Monde enchanté is both a literary history of the French fairy-tale tradition and a substantial anthology of some of its most important stories. De Lescure opens the volume with an extensive study of fairies and la littérature féerique en France, before presenting twelve tales drawn from several of the writers who shaped the French literary fairy tale during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The selection is particularly appealing. Alongside Perrault’s La Belle au Bois dormant, Cendrillon and Le Petit-Poucet appear Madame d’Aulnoy’s L’Oiseau Bleu, La Biche au Bois and La Chatte Blanche, as well as Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s celebrated La Belle et la Bête. The impressive series of 37 engravings and the luxurious red morocco binding make this copy considerably more decorative than the ordinary examples of the edition.
The author:
Mathurin de Lescure [1833–1892] was a French historian, critic, man of letters and editor whose writings ranged widely across French literature and cultural history. His introductory essay in Le Monde enchanté places the fairy tale within a broader literary tradition and reflects the nineteenth-century revival of scholarly and popular interest in folklore, fantasy and the literature of childhood.
By combining literary history with the texts themselves, Lescure created a volume that could be appreciated both as an anthology of beloved tales and as a study of the development of French féerie.
The illustrator:
A. Gaillard supplied the drawings for the 37 engravings that enliven this edition. His illustrations range from intimate narrative scenes to dramatic full-page compositions filled with enchanted forests, supernatural beings, elegant interiors and fairy-tale heroines.
The finely worked monochrome illustrations suit the sophisticated character of the book particularly well, giving familiar stories such as Cendrillon, La Belle au Bois dormant and La Belle et la Bête a distinctly late nineteenth-century visual interpretation.
