Beschreibung:

Acajou et Zirphile, conte.
Paris: Minutiae, 1761. With engraved title page vignette after Charles-Noclas Cochin (the Younger) and 10 engraved plates after François Boucher (being reduced copies from the 1744 quarto edition). [iv] 12mo (160 x 150 mm). Later morocco-backed marbled boards, spine gilt titled. Condition: minor internal soiling. Uncommon: RLIN records only one copy of this printing in NYPL. According to Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1824), “This single volume is one of the most whimsical of fairy tales, and an amusing satire originating in an odd circumstance.” These exquisite designs by the French court painter were originally commissioned in 1740 by his patron Count Carl Gustav Tessin, Swedish ambassador to Paris, for a fairy tale inspired by the beauty of the artist’s wife and published in Faunillane ou l'Infante jaune (1741). When the ambassador was recalled to Sweden, Boucher held a competition for an entirely new conte de fée to acompany these plates of genies in chamber pots and disembodied hands. Duclos won with a burlesque of the fashionable French literary fairy tale. He prefaced his “piece of nonsense” with a sarcastic “Epitre au public.” “You are a child to run after trifles,” he chastised his French readers; “a youth when driven by your passions; and, in mature age, you conclude you are wise, because your follies are of a more solemn nature, for you grow old only to dote; to talk at random, to act without design, and to believe you judge, because you pronounce sentence.” This is the reduced version of the original 1744 quarto with the “Epitre au public” intact. When the fairy tale was reprinted in vol. 35 of the Cabinet des fées (1785), the editor judiciously dropped the insulting “Epitre.