Campan | Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, London, 1823, 4 volumes, armorial morocco gilt, with an original document

Campan, Jeanne-Louise-Henriette

Memoirs of the private life of Marie Antoinette, queen of France and Navarre. Extra illustrated. London: for Henry Colburn and Co. and M. Bossange and Co., 1823

4 volumes, 8vo (220 x 127mm.), WITH A DOCUMENT ISSUED IN MARIE ANTOINETTE'S NAME (Versailles, 19 July 1786, with a clerical signature of Marie Antoinette and countersigned by Pierre Jean Baptiste Beaugeard) bound at the start of volume 1, frontispiece portrait, EXTRA-ILLUSTRATED with 193 portraits and views (6 double-page) taken from numerous different sources, depicting the people and places mentioned in the text, some remargined to fit the textblock, crushed black morocco gilt by Zaehnsdorf (dated 1912) with gilt arms of John de Kay and gilt fleurs-de-lys at corners, spines similarly gilt, top edge gilt, others uncut, upper cover of volume 1 detached, joints rubbed and weak

Madame Campan's memoirs of Marie Antoinette, to whom she had been femme de chambre until 1792, were first published posthumously in 1823 and quickly appeared in numerous editions, both in French and English. This copy has an additional title-page in each volume stating that it is extra illustrated; the ordinary copies were in two volumes, not four.

The vellum document issued on behalf of Marie Antoinette (bound at the start of volume 1, 322 x 475mm., folded) relates to the domestic appointment of Louis Philippe Gendron to the post of écuyer de cuisine commun.

PROVENANCE:

John Wesley de Kay (1872-1938), armorial bookplates and arms on bindings