Jehan MESCHINOT. Les lunettes des princes avec aulcunes balades & additions nouvellement composes. Small in-16, blue morocco with Du Seuil decoration on the boards, spine with 5 ornate nerves, interior roulette, edges gilt on marbling (Bauzonnet). Brunet, III-1670 // Tchemerzine-Scheler, IV-711. (128 f.) / A-Q8 / 69 x 114 mm. Last edition of Lunettes des princes shared between Jehan Bignon, Gilles Corrozet, Pierre Sergent and Pierre Hermier. The author, born in Nantes around 1515, was attached as maître d'hôtel to the house of the Dukes of Brittany and was retained under this title by Anne of Brittany when she married Charles VIII and then Louis XII, his successor. Meschinot's poems are imbued with sadness. The author embodies the opposite of the proverb Après la pluie vient le beau temps. You only need to quote a few lines to realise this: After fine weather comes rain and storms... ...Se nous avons liesse, elle est bien briesve... ...After health comes body aches and tests... Wars and debates come after the truce... This pessimistic nature is said to have come from his wife Philippa d'Andouelle, who is said to have secretly given birth to a child and killed it in their house, while Meschinot, who was in the next room but deaf, heard nothing. Be that as it may, Meschinot's Les lunettes des princes was a great success. In this poem of almost 3,000 lines, Meschinot has a dream in which Reason gives Meschinot a book called Conscience and, to read it, spectacles whose lenses are called prudence and justice, joined by a nail called Temperance. The author wakes up and reads his book, which is a series of instructions and guidelines for living. The first edition was published in 1493, and Tchemerzine lists more than twenty editions up to the present one. Printer's mark on last leaf. A fine copy. Provenance: De Bure l'aîné (handwritten annotation collated complete / 24 April 1839 / J.-J. de Bure l'aîné) and Henri Bordes (bookplate).