AUNILLON, Pierre Charles Sabiot, Abbé du Gué de Launay (1684-1760), attributed. 'Memoires de Mad[am]e Vanfeld adressés à mad[am]e la marquise de Ronceval', n.p., n.d. [mid-18th century].

AUNILLON, Pierre Charles Sabiot, Abbé du Gué de Launay (1684-1760), attributed. 'Memoires de Mad[am]e Vanfeld adressés à mad[am]e la marquise de Ronceval', n.p., n.d. [mid-18th century].

An authorial mansucript for this apparently unpublished novel. The frequent corrections to the manuscript consistently change proper names, both of people and places, but also at times cancel or replace passages of text. The story it relates is, as the Bérard sale notes, 'plus que galant, [et] rempli d'aventures intéressantes'. Pierre Charles Sabiot Aunillon is recorded as the author of a number of fantastical tales published around 1750. According to the Biographical Dictionary of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowldege (London: 1844) his first known literary publication dates from 1715, 'a Funeral Oration on Louis XIV, in the cathedral of Evreux, [which] was considered one of the worst of the many which the occasion had called forth'; the same work notes that 'In the year 1746 he was employed on the Rhine by the French government as a secret political agent, and the reports made by him in that capacity are still extant in MS'.

Contemporary manuscript, 713 pages, 238 x 180mm, an elegant copy primarily in a single hand, with frequent apparently authorial cancellations, emendations and additions in a second hand; the last two pages are are an addition in a third hand. Engraved author portrait (by Briandt, engraved by J. Tardieu), and four illustrations in pen, ink and wash, attributed to 'L. Vigée' [perhaps Louis Vigée (1715-1767), father of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun)]. In two volumes, 18th-century mottled calf (worn, rebacked). Provenance: the copy apparently corresponds with that described in the sale of the library of A.L.S. Bérard, Paris, 7 May 1829, lot 1088, where the manuscript corrections are described as being in Aunillon's autograph.

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