(Bibliothèque bleue). ~ 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, La Bibliothèque bleue en Normandie (1928), 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’.