Description

NINTH EDITION IN THE ORIGINAL PART with three additions Messéniennes news, speeches inaugurating theatres at Le Havre and the Odéon, Les Troyennes, an imitation of Euripides and several other plays.
The work is illustrated with hors-texte vignettes engraved by Thompson after Devéria and 6 hors-texte plates and a title printed on Chine appliqué engraved after Devéria by Baquoy, Godefroy, Mougeot, Lefèvre (the younger), Lefèvre (the elder) and Dequevauviller. There are copies with 7 or 11 engravings as well as copies with a suite.
The fourth book, given by the publisher the following year and including the epistle to M. de Lamartine and the Messénienne to Lord Byron, was bound in.

The first Messenians, Waterloo and The Malheurs war were published after the defeat at Waterloo in July 1815. Delavigne became a national poet by declaring himself against the victor; a poet of the fatherland who protested against the unpunished exactions of museum looters:

"Muses, bend your heads down;
From the century of Leon the divine masterpieces
Under a cloudless sky, the cold Germans will follow;
Albion's ships are waiting for our statues.
Inhuman desecrators
Will they wipe out so many old watches?
Will they put the iron on the living canvases...
Which Raphael animated with his hands?"
(From the Museum)

In 1821, thanks to the Duke of Orléans, Delavigne was appointed librarian of the Palais-Royal and became a member of the Académie Française in 1825. Genius of the 19th century, admired by Balzac, who was inspired by his Sicilian Vespers, Delavigne is today known to few and unknown to many.

From the library of Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838), known as Talleyrand, with his heraldic bookplate.Valençay castle library"(Indre) on the upper back cover.

A luxuriously bound copy of the period. 

Quérard II, p. 445-46.