TAINE, Hippolyte.

£200 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Un Séjour en France de 1792 à 1795. First edition in book form of Taine's translation of these letters of an anonymous English lady, resident in France immediately after the Revolution.Taine discovered the work while preparing for his ultimately unfinished historical magnum opus Les Origines de la France Contemporaine. "During his early researches Taine discovered in the Richelieu collection a book by an English lady who had been detained in France from 1792 to 1795, and who, upon her return to England, had given her journal and her letters to Mr. John Gifford to publish, which was done in 1796. Taine considered these documents worthy of introduction to French readers, and had them translated under his own supervision, and published by instalments in the Français during the latter part of 1871. The publication of these documents in volume form gave rise to some sharp discussion in the papers, some maintaining that they were the work of a paid agent of Pitt's, others, - and these more numerous, - declaring them to be a mere invention of Taine himself. In the second edition of the volume, Taine therefore had to give a reference to the original in the catalogue of the Bibliothéque Nationale, thus victoriously confuting the second objection. For the first, however, it was necessary to discover the name of the anonymous writer, and unfortunately the premises of Messrs. Longways, where the papers were first published, had been entirely destroyed by fire. Taine, however, had studi

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