Le Emportemens amoureux de la Religieuse etrangère. Nouvelle galante &…

12mo (143 × 78 mm), three parts in one, each with separate title, pp. 48; [4], 116; 119, [1], woodcut and typographical ornaments. Some light waterstaining, a small scatter of worming to blank lower margin of final 20 leaves or so, old inkstain to first title. Contemporary sprinkled sheep, gilt panelled spine, lettered direct. Rubbed, head of spine slightly chipped/torn with minor loss. Early woodcut armorial bookplate with the motto ‘Vincet amor patriae’. A good copy.

First edition with this title and introductory part, a very rare opportunistic edition of Lettres Portuguaises, which found itself onto the Index librorum prohibitorum in 1727. The epistolary novel Lettres Portugaises was one of the publishing sensations of the late seventeenth century and beyond, first published in Paris in 1669, purporting to be the genuine letters between a Portugese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, and the French nobleman, the Marquis de Chamilly. Despite its passionate tone it was not outlawed and indeed it was widely reprinted and set the tone for much of the sentimental and epistolary fiction of the eighteenth century. Though the letters have been proved to be fictional, both parties were real.

This edition, probably clandestine, seems to have been a step too far in the eyes of the censors. Apparently a reissue of the sheets of a 1696 Lyon edition, it was augmented with a 48-page prequel in which the first encounters between Maria and the Marquis in Portugal are recounted. This text was cast as a seduction scene, in which the young nun entertained the Marquis in a private apartment beside her cloister, dressed in a pale blue nightgown adorned with red ribbons. Suppression seems to have been effective and it is unrecorded in public collections, as far as we can tell, besides a single copy in the library at Bourg-en-Bresse. Gay mentions it among the reprints of Lettres Portugaises, citing a copy offered for sale in Paris in 1869. Gay II, 847. Not found in Worldcat.