[MOREL, Jean.] [ Drop-head title: ] De Nuptiis D. Eustachii de Refuge in supremo Senatu Consiliarii Regii & D. Helenae de Bellievre.

£750 · Offered by Henry Sotheran Ltd

A Wedding for the Court Elite [MOREL, Jean.] [ Drop-head title: ] De Nuptiis D. Eustachii de Refuge in supremo Senatu Consiliarii Regii D. Helenae de Bellievre. [ Paris: Philippe Du Pré . 1595.] 4to. Nineteenth-century morocco, flat spine richly gilt, board-edges and turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt; pp. 6, [2 (blank)] woodcut headpiece to p. 1 signed ‘Denis du Pre’ and with central roundel incorporating his device with the motto ‘Odiosa veritas’; a few scuffs to boards, spine and corners rubbed; uniform light toning; else very well preserved. First edition, seemingly institutionally unrecorded, of this neo-Latin epithalamium by Jean Morel, head of the University of Paris’s Collège de Reims, composed on the occasion of the 1595 wedding of Hélène de Bellièvre and the statesman Eustache de Refuge, author of a best-selling Machiavellian guide for courtiers. Hélène de Bellièvre (b. 1572/73) was one of nine daughters of Pomponne de Bellièvre, Chancellor of France; he had undertaken more than a dozen diplomatic missions for Henry III of France and in 1586 had been sent to London to persuade Elizabeth I not to execute Mary, Queen of Scots. She had married Claude Prévost, Master of Requests, in 1586, and remarried Eustache de Refuge, Prévost’s first cousin on his father’s side, five years after her first husband’s death in 1590. De Refuge (1564–1617) was ambassador to the Low Countries and the Swiss Cantons and served in the Parlement of Paris. He is perhaps best known for his bestsellin

• Binding: Hardcover

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