Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de SADE.

Lot 22
Go to lot
Estimation :
8000 - 12000 EUR
Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de SADE.
Les Crimes de l'Amour, heroic and tragic short stories; preceded by an Idea on novels, and decorated with engravings. By D.A.F. Sade, author of Aline et Valcour. Paris, Massé, year VIII [1800]. 4 volumes in 2 volumes in-12 : half brown basane, smooth spines decorated with gilt fillets, red calf title-pieces, yellow edges (modern binding). First edition: it is decorated with four frontispieces, engraved in intaglio, unsigned; they are printed before the letter, as it should be. An important literary manifesto. By way of a Foreword, the Marquis de Sade delivers, in about fifty pages, his Idea on novels. No doubt in order to escape the denunciations of which he was the object, he makes the apology of the sensitive and moral novel, getting out of it by a pirouette addressed to the detractors of Aline and Valcour: "I answer that I have made those of my heroes who follow the career of vice so frightful, that they very often inspire neither pity nor love, and in this I am more moral than those who think they are permitted to embellish them." He expresses his admiration for Mme de La Fayette, Rousseau, and the Abbé Prévost; on the other hand, Restif de La Bretonne is unceremoniously executed, due to his "low style, disgusting adventures... for which only the pepper merchants will thank him." The essay ends with a surprisingly strong praise of nature. It is a nature "more bizarre than the moralists paint it for us," incorporating both destructive forces and perversions. A collection of eleven short stories, two of which, according to Gilbert Lély, "deserve to be ranked among the marquis's masterpieces: Florville and Courval and Eugénie de Franval." The short stories are heroic and tragic fictions, inspired by contemporary noir novels, following a reverse moral... "There is neither tale nor novel in all the literature of Europe where the dangers of libertinism are more forcefully exposed," the author admits about Eugenie de Franval. Ready for all erotic games, the heroine discovers herself as her brother's lover, her son's murderer, her mother's denouncer and her father's wife. A recently bound copy: part of the original spine and the title-pieces have been glued back together. From the J.C. Courbin library, with bookplate. Courbin, with bookplate. (Delon, Sade, un athée en amour, Bibliothèque Bodmer, 2014, nº 84.- Cohen, 922: the copy A. Bégis is the only one cited.- Monglond, V, 343-344.- Martin-Mylne, Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1751-1800, 1977, p. 456: the British Library and BnF copies are listed as missing).
My orders
Sale information
Sales conditions
Return to catalogue