(CHAPBOOK). ~ L’histoire de la Belle Hélaine de Constantinople, mère de Saint Martin de Tours en Touraine et de Saint-Brice [Caen: A. Hardel], [1800].
12mo (170 × 104 mm), pp. 40. Woodcut portrait to title (from a heavily degraded block showing evidence of several wormholes. Partially unopened, stitched in contemporary pale blue wrappers, which are rather soiled and frayed. A fair copy.
A Caen-printed bibliothèque bleue edition of a title popular in the genre, with other editions from Paris, Tours and Lyons. The woodcut portrait was evidently old when the edition was printed, the impression showing a scatter of wormholes affecting La Belle Hélaine’s face, hair and shoulders. The text has it origins in a Middle French chanson de geste of the fourteenth century. cf. Hélot 114 noting the degradation of the woodcut over its several issues, and this one specifically where: ‘la pauvre belle devient effrayante, avec un véritable trou à la place de l’oeil gauche’.