LE NORMAND, Marie-Anne Adélaïde. ~ Le Petit Homme Rouge au château des Tuileries. La vérité à̀ Holy-rood. Prédictions, etc. Paris: [Dondey-Dupré], Mlle Le Normand, éditeur-libraire, rue de Tournon, no. 5, Fauborg Saint-Germain, Dondey-Dupré père et fils,... et chez les principaux libraires de al capitale et de l’étranger, 30 July 1831.
8vo (220 × 140 mm), pp. [4], 106, [2]. Uncut and mostly unopened in original rose pink wrappers. Slightly faded and dust-soiled, but a very good copy, as issued.
First edition of Le Norman’s predictions issued in the wake of the July Revolution of 1830 and the restoration of the monarchy under Louis Philippe, events welcomed by Le Normand, who saw the ghost of Louis XVI as her protector. Like her previous collections, it consists of accounts of her ‘visions intuitives’ and ‘Révélations politiques, symboliques, prophètiques, somnambulismes etc’. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers and pamphleteers repeated that tale of the ‘Little Red Man’ purported to be from an old folk tale dating back to the creation of the Tuileries Palace (1564) in which Le Petit Homme Rouge (a genie, or ghost) had appeared to the kings and queens living in the palace on the eve of great events, from Catherine de Medici to Napoleon. Here Le Normand uses him to recount the counsel given to Napoleon at Malmaison in 1793, that France could never be a democracy. Chapter five is set at the Scottish royal palace of Holyrood where the deposed Charles X had lived between 1796-1803
The title verso has an advert for eleven works hitherto published and still marketed by Le Normand at her shop in rue de Torunon, all priced, together with three fothcoming works ‘sous presse’ and a collected works in 10 volumes. Caillet 6514 (’Ouvrage peu commun’).