One of only 25 copies containing 12 etching proofs

Boulmier, Joseph

Les Villanelles, de Joseph Boulmier avec ses poésies en langage du XVe siècle [#3 of 25 copies]

Paris: Isidore Liseux 1879. Second Edition. [4], 140 pages plus twelve etching proofs as frontispieces. 6 1/8 x 4 1/8 inches Vellum binding stamped "E. Carayon" on front flyleaf verso. Title, author, and date hand painted on the spine with flourishes. Marbled endpapers. The half-title with finely penned manuscript note:"Avec douze épreuve de l'Eau-forte, Vingt-cinq exemplaires numérotés No. 3" Original publisher's wrappers bound. Title page and original wrappers in red and black. A few penciled notations indicating this may have been in a library, otherwise quite clean. Two corners bumped.

Bound as follows. Marbled endpapers + blank flyleaf with original spine wrapper tipped on verso + original front wrapper + 2 blank leaves + halftitle leaf "Villanelles" with manuscript limitation note recto and author works on verso + 12 leaves of etching proofs + title page leaf + 140 pages + 2 blank leaves + original rear wrapper + blank leaf + marbled endpapers. Near Fine. Vellum. [24498]


One of only 25 copies with twelve etching proofs bound in before the title page, this being copy #3. "E. Carayon" is the well known French binder Emile Carayon. The etching is by D LALAUZE. Examples in the original wrappers are generally available. This version is rare.

A collection of Villanelles gathered by Boulmier, this is the second enlarged edition from 1879 (see below).

"VILLANELLE, a form of verse, originally loose in construction, but since the 16th century bound in exact limits of an arbitrary kind. The word is ultimately derived from the Latin villa, a country house or farm, through the Italian villano, a peasant or farm hand, and a villanelle was primarily a round song taken up by men on a farm. The Spaniards called such a song a villancejo or villancete or a villancico, and a man who improvised villanelles was a villanciquero. The villanelle was a pastoral poem made to accompany a rustic dance, and from the first it was necessary that it should contain a regular system of repeated lines. The old French villanelles, however, were irregular in form. One of the most celebrated, the “Rosette, pour un peu d'absence” of Philippe Desportes (1545–1606), is a sort of ballade, and those contained in the Astrée of d’Urfé, 1610, are scarcely less unlike the villanelles of modern times. It appears, indeed, to have been by an accident that the special and rigorously defined form of the villanelle was invented. In the posthumous poems of Jean Passerat (1534–1602), which were printed in 1606, several villanelles were discovered, in different forms....This exquisite lyric has continued to be the type of its class, and the villanelle, therefore, for the last three hundred years has been a poem, written in tercets, on two rhymes, the first and the third line being repeated alternatively in each tercet It is usual to confine the villanelle to five tercets, but that is not essential; it must, however, close with a quatrain, the last two lines of which are the first and third line of the original tercet. The villanelle was extremely admired by the French poets of the Parnasse, and one of them, Théodore de Banville, compared it to a ribband of silver and gold traversed by a thread of rose-colour. Boulmier, who was the first to point out that Passerat was the inventor of the definite villanelle, published collections of these poems in 1878 and 1879, and was preparing another when he died in 1881. When, in 1877, so many of the early French forms of verse were introduced, or reintroduced, into English literature, the villanelle attracted a great deal of attention; it was simultaneously cultivated by W. E. Henley, Austin Dobson, Lang and Gosse." (Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1911)

Price: $250.00