Pierre Charron - De la Sagesse - 1783

CHARRON (Pierre). Of Wisdom. Paris, Jean-François Bastien, 1783. 1 vol. in-8, xxviii, 768 pp., portrait-frontispiece and an allegorical plate engraved, marbled calf, smooth spine ornamented with golden floral vases, borders and a frieze at the tail, title-piece in tawny leather (binding slightly later).

Edition based on the original Bordeaux text, 1601.

A Doctor of Law, theologian and preacher to Queen Marguerite, Pierre Charron (1541-1603) allied himself in Bordeaux with Montaigne (1533-1592), who authorized him by will to bear his arms. Printed at Simon Millanges (1540-1623) in 1601, Wisdom orders in a moral system the scepticism of the Essais and separates probity from religious belief, which earned him attacks from the Jesuits and the Sorbonne. Judging the later editions, Elzevirian included, faulty, Jean-François Bastien (1747-1824) returned to the 1601 text and added a life of the author.

The work is divided into three books: knowledge of oneself and the human condition; the general precepts of wisdom; the four moral virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. The portrait in a medallion on a plinth is drawn and engraved by Noël Pruneau (born in 1751). Another plate reproduces the emblematic frontispiece of the original edition: Wisdom nude, crowned with laurel, standing on a pedestal between Charron’s mottos “Je ne sçay” and “Paix et peu,” holding at its feet four female figures, Passion, Opinion, Superstition and pedantic Science, one of them bearing an open book on the words “Oui Non.”

Binding slightly rubbed with small leather losses, corners worn, dusty traces along the margins of about twenty leaves, probably due to exposure to humidity, not serious though more pronounced on the last flyleaves, other minor defects.