<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">Three works bound in one 12 mo. volume. pp. (4), 107, (1); pp. 58; pp. (2), 47, (1). Contemporary vellum. The third work lacking title leaf but otherwise complete with preface ‘Au Lecteur’ (A2r-v).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">Its earliest owner (‘Ces Lettres Portugaises appartient a moy’) signs himself ‘A. Corfray’, and records his purchase as ‘achetees 8 avril 1676’, and he/she may have written the admiring lines on the front and back flyleaves. A further inscription on the flyleaves reads: ‘A Saso l’ivoirine / qui dissipa les nuages / Paul Eluard / 27.1.50.’ The acclaimed French poet Éluard (1898-1954) gifted the evocative set to his lover, Jacqueline Trutat (‘Saso’), with a pun on the nickname of his dead wife ‘Nusch’ (Maria Benz).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">The phenomenally popular epistolary sequence Lettres d’amour d’une religieuse portugaise (or simply Lettres portugaises) has itself undergone a sequence of classifications as contradictory as its evolving reputation. On its first appearance, at Paris in 1669, it was presented as the one-sided correspondence by Mariana Alcoferado, a Portuguese nun of the Convent of Conceicpalo, addressing a noble French military officer serving in the internal Portuguese wars of the 1660s. The five letters progressed from starstruck love and hope to disappointment, despair, and disdain. The Chevalier’s amorous pursuit had nearly driven Mariana to forsake her vows, but after the officer was called back to France, he forgot his protestations of constancy, and failed even to reply to her passionate missives, increasingly desperate as months pass; and when finally pressed to acknowledge receipt, admitted to having found new companionship, bringing on tragic Mariana’s equally passionate curses.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">This short, semi-erotic and above all sentimental concoction, almost certainly from the pen of the needy adventurer Joseph de Lavergne, Comte de Guilleragues (1628-1685), took its early pan-European, primarily female, audience by storm, and set off an immediate campaign to identify the pseudonymous heroine and the anti-heroic ‘Chevalier de C.,’ which has continued, off and on, for nearly three centuries. More or less finally conceded to be fiction (although a recent study by Myriam Cyr, Uncovering the mystery behind a 17th-century forbidden love. New York, 2006, has revived the dim theory of historicity), Lettres portugaises has been re-celebrated as the true initiator of the 17th- and 18th-century vogue of the ‘sentimental novel/novella,’ and the generic influence upon ‘La Princesse de Clèves’ and its ‘psychological’ offspring from Rousseau to Stendhal to Goethe. </span><span style="font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:11.5pt;">The success of the original letters led to an imitative sequel to the first publication, the ‘Seconde partie’ of seven more, by an unknown author – albeit issued by, and very likely commissioned by or through Claude Barbin, the eminent registered publisher of Guillerages’s seminal work, and of some of his subsequent writings. Barbin did in fact attribute the continuation to ‘une Femme du monde, qui écrit d’un style different de celui d’une Religieuse.’ In the same year, another Parisian publisher issued five best-selling Responses by Maria’s fled lover, reprinted by countless piratical presses, and generating at least two sequels of their own. The publisher’s preface ‘Au Lecteur’ (as in the present copy of ‘Response aux Lettres Portugaises. Traduites en Françoises,’ A2r-v) provides a forged provenance of the replies, implicating that it was true love all along, which must have reassured the readers of 1669-forward throughout the dozens of combined editions then published and sold.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:justify;line-height:normal;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/permalink/01JHU_INST/1lu78g9/alma991007730259707861" rel="nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.</a></span></span></p>