SCARRON (Paul). Le Romant comique. Paris, Toussainct Quinet, 1651. - Le Romant comique. Seconde partie. Paris, Guillaume de Luyne, 1657. 2 volumes in-8, jansenist lemon morocco, interior lace, gilt edges (Mercier sr. de Cuzin). Extremely rare first edition of the two parts of the Roman comique. The first part was published by Toussaint Quinet on 15 September 1651; it was reprinted under the dates 1652 and 1654, and republished with a few minor corrections in 1655. It is dedicated to Cardinal de Retz, coadjutor archbishop of Paris, and features an unsigned frontispiece, dated as always 1652, and a title vignette with the publisher's motto, both engraved in etching. The second part was published in 1657 by Guillaume de Luyne, son-in-law and heir of Toussaint Quinet, who had died in 1652. Scarron dedicated it to Madame Fouquet, the second wife of the Superintendent of Finances. The two parts of the novel were brought together in the 1658 edition. These two volumes contain all that Scarron wrote of the Roman comique, for he died while working on the third part, of which nothing has survived. His readers had to make do with apocryphal continuations, such as Offray's suite in the 1660s or the one given by Jean de Préchac in 1679. Only eight copies of the original edition of the first part, dated 1651, are known to exist, two of which, according to Vérène de Diesbach, are incomplete. Of these, five are held in public libraries - BnF (incomplete frontispiece), Arsenal, Mazarine (incomplete dedication leaf), Versailles and the British Museum; while only three copies were still in private hands in the former Guyot de Villeneuve (the present copy), De Backer (1926, I, no. 731) and Du Tillet (1938, I, no. 131, now in the Bonna collection) collections. The Roman comique is the main claim to fame of Paul Scarron (1610-1660), author of baroque comedies and novels recognised, according to Henri Coulet, as "the creator of burlesque, in which one should not see merely the denigrating caricature of the epic and the heroic novel, but a form of gushing imagination and an original grasp of reality, served by a style full of invention". A high quality copy soberly bound by Mercier in Jansenist lemon morocco. From the Guyot de Villeneuve library (1901, II, n°1033). Gustave Guyot de Villeneuve (1825-1898) was one of the greatest French bibliophiles of the second half of the 19th century, a close friend of the Duc d'Aumale and a member of the Bibliophiles françois, of which he became president in 1894. The copy was sold to the bookseller Édouard Rahir. Magne, nos. 256 and 263 - Tchemerzine, V, 716a and 718 - Le Petit, 129 - Lever, 376 - Diesbach-Soultrait, no. 290 - Brunet, Suppl, II, 609 - En français dans le texte, no. 95.