Veuve Duchesne - Les soirées amusantes - 1788

Charming witness to the social life and entertainments of the late Ancien Régime, this graceful collection devoted to board and conversation games perfectly illustrates the spirit of the Enlightenment in its moments of aristocratic and bourgeois leisure.

THE AMUSING EVENINGS, or Conversation on wagering games, and others, which may amuse young people, both in Town and in the Country, especially on somewhat long evenings.
From simple games of his childhood, / Happy is he who remembers for a long time.
In Paris, at the Widow DUCHESNE, Bookseller, rue S. Jacques, at the Temple of Taste. 1788.

A volume in-12 (approximately 9 x 14 cm) with continuous pagination, collated complete with its notebooks, half-title, title and its dialogued texts featuring various characters with allegorical or rustic names (the Abbe des Agneaux, Madame de la Rivière, Mademoiselle Rose, the Chevalier Zéphir, etc.) engaging in wagering and salon games. The work is illustrated with engravings hors-texte or in the text (notably diagrams of board or social games such as Loto or token games).
Contemporary full calf binding with marbled skin, spine with raised bands ornate with gilded compartments and decorative tools, red morocco title piece bearing the inscription “LES SOIREES”, red edges. Copy preserved in its original patina, interior wear though with some scattered foxing.

Published by the widow Duchesne — a key figure of Parisian bookselling in the second half of the eighteenth century, established on Rue Saint-Jacques — this type of handbook of family and fashionable amusement was highly prized in castles and bourgeois salons to enliven long winter evenings. It offers today a precious and vivid glimpse of the customs, codes of sociability, and entertainments then in vogue on the eve of the French Revolution.