Le Temple du Bonheur ou Recueil des Plus Excellens Traités sur le Bonheur, Extraits des Meilleurs Auteurs Anciens et Modernes
Hardcover
1769 · Bouillon:
by DREUX DU RADIER, Jean-François de (17141780)
Bouillon: : chez Lacombe, aux dépens de la Societé Typographique, 1769. Hardcover. Near Fine. M.D.CC.LXIX (1769). Three volumes in 12mo (170 x mm). Pagination: I: [8], 358pp., [1]; II:[2],346pp. III: [4], 320pp. Signatures: Frontispiece and one plate. Contemporary leather and marbled boards; nice set. First edition of this anonymous French anthology on the art of happiness and pleasure, mainly concerning its psychological and moral aspects - as in both virtue and vice. A rather clandestine collection of treatises, the title roughly translates as The Temple of Happiness, or a Collection of the Most Excellent Treatises on Happiness, Takenfrom the Best Authors Ancient and Modern. A corrected nouvelle edition, augmented with a fourth volume, followed in 1770 and is more commonly found. Although published anonymously, this work has widely been (by British Museum and Bibliothèque Nationale de France catalogues and Quérard [La France littéraire]) attributed to Jean-François de Dreux du Radier (1714–1780), who published an earlier Temple du Bonheur in 1740, although this attribution with the current work is still contested (see Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes, 1806–09). According to the 1995 publication the Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France 1769–1789 by Robert Darnton, the Temple du Bonheur was confiscated by customs in 1775 and Dreux du Radier was exiled for seditious talk. This is a rare work with a complicated history (authorship and details of the censorship in question), but it was ultimately endorsed and sold with the Parisian bookseller Jacques Lacombe (1724–1810), responsible for disseminating several other works on the finer arts in the late 18th century. This is a rare, complete set of the first publication of the provocative Temple du Bonheur, a part of the literary underground of eighteenth-century France. OCLC locates copies of the 1769 edition in North America at the University of Michigan and McGill University. (Inventory #: WB16249)