Description

FIRST EDITION of the first collection by Delphine Gay, the future Delphine de Girardin, published at a time when the  poetess was still only 20 years old.
Illustrated on the frontispiece with a lithograph by Villain after Collière, illustrating the poem "Le dévouement des médecins français et des soeurs de Sainte Camille dans la Peste de Barcelone".
There are a few copies on vellum paper (Vicaire, III, 989).
Interspersed with a small engraved portrait of Delphine Gay, cut out and pasted on a card.

Nice copy left  in its original brochure.

Enclosed:
Georges d'HEILLY
Madame de Girardin (Delphine Gay), Her life and works
Paris: Librairie Bachelin-Deflorenne, 1868
In-18° (106 x 158 mm), 125 pp. - 1] f., blue-grey half cloth, brown morocco title page, cover preserved without spine.
Illustrated with an etched portrait by G. Staal. Ex-libris "Henry Dunand".

In 1822, Delphine Gay, daughter of Sophie Gay, took part in the Académie's poetry competition on the theme "The devotion of the French doctors and the sisters of Sainte Camille in the Barcelona plague". Word of her success spread to the court, and she was commissioned to write a number of verses - she wrote an elegy for Napoleon and General Foy (the last stanza of which is engraved on his tombstone), and verses for the coronation of Charles X... In 1825, her New Poetic Essays. After this first period of her literary career, Delphine de Girardin devoted herself to journalism and theatre, publishing several short stories and novels.