GARASSE, François.

Very rare first edition, attractively printed, of these commemorative verses dedicated to King Louis XIII of France on behalf of the Jesuit college at Poitiers, celebrating Louis' coronation at Rheims while simultaneously lamenting the assassination of his father Henri IV. The author was the virulent Jesuit apologist and Catholic polemicist François Garasse (1585-1631), who donated this copy.

In 1610 King Henri IV of France was assassinated by François Ravaillac, a Catholic, who approached the monarch in his coach and stabbed him. Some particularly zealous Catholics had never accepted the conversion of Henri, originally a Huguenot, to Catholicism, in an attempt to unite a bitterly divided country; he was, of course, equally despised by extreme Huguenots as a traitor, but was broadly a popular and beloved king. Henri’s son Louis was only nine years old when he succeeded the throne, under the regency of his mother Marie de Medici. He was crowned in Reims Cathedral, traditional coronation church of the French monarchs, on 17 October.

The book opens with Pausanias’s description of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia in Greek and Latin translation. Garasse’s poems are on the symbols of coronation: crown, scepter, golden arm and ivory hand, oriflamme banner, ring, garments and shoes with fleurs-de-lys, chivalric insignia, sword, golden spurs, throne, and, finally, the tradition of the king's touch, supposed to cure scrofula. They are followed by brief prose elucidations of the symbols, with liberal quotation from Greek sources. Garasse's elegies to Henri IV are also furnished with scholarly references in Latin and Greek; undoubtedly the book functions as an advertisement for the strengths of the Jesuit school at Poitiers, founded in 1605 and where Garasse was professor. One of the elegies is on Angoulême, the city where Garasse was born and where Henri was assassinated.

This copy is from the noted library of Eugène-François-Désiré Ruggieri (1818-85) of the famous Italian family of firework specialists, employed as early as the C18th by the French monarchs and still in business, in a sumptuous binding by Andrieux, binder to the House of Orléans in the late C19th. It appears as no. 366 in the catalogue of the Ruggieri library, Catalogue des livres rares et précieux composant la bibliothèque de M. E.-F.-D.- Ruggieri (Paris: 1873), p. 78.

'Livre fort rare' (Ruggieri cat.).