Correspondence philosophique de Caillot Duval, rédigée d’apres les Pièces originales, et publiée par une Société de Littérateurs Lorrains

8vo. pp. xii, 236. Original blue sugar-paper wrappers (loosely stitched and defective), uncut. Endleaves from the epilogue to Mme Riccoboni’s ‘Le mariage clandestin,’ a French translation of Garrick and Colman’s comedy of 1766, printed by Marc Michel Rey at Amsterdam in 1768; in a cloth folding case.

First edition of a classic hoax by two bored young aristocrats, Alphonse de Fortia de Piles and Pierre Marie Louis de Boisgelin de Kerdu serving as army officers quartered at Nancy in 1784, who took the pseudonymn of Caillot-Duval to write mock letters of admiration to unsuspecting celebrities: a pompous local magistrate and a vain opera diva at Paris in search of a patron, leading them on to great expectations and risible replies. Ten years later, they anonymously published the correspondence. See the description in A. Freeman, Hoax, fake, and fraud. Literary forgery from Ctesias to Wise. One hundred books and manuscripts. London, 2013, item 17, and J.-M. Quérard, Les supercheries littéraires dévoilées; seconde édition, considérablement augmentée, publiée par MM. Gustave Brunet et Pierre Jannet. Paris, 1869, I, p. 632.

It is perhaps revealing that the imprint is fictitious, or that the sheets travelled from Nancy to Amsterdam before even being wrappered, and were distributed -- as somewhat "dangerous material" -- from that less regulated publishers' entrepôt. Marc-Michel Rey of Geneva, active at Amsterdam from 1744 to his death in 1780, was the principal lifetime publisher of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as of anti-clerical and atheistical writings of Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and Baron d'Holbach. Why were wastepapers from his library being used, fifteen year safter his death, to wrap sheets supposedly generated 260 miles away, in French Nancy-- save for the coincidence that "Caillot Duval" is itself something of a clandestine text, perhaps subject to censorship or suppression locally? Rey's extensive publishing activities have been well studied of late (e.g. by Max Fajn in JAPS, 1984), but the fate of his business after 1780 is not known.

A copy of the standard but scarce bibliophile account of the hoax, Lorédan Larchey's "Les mystifications de Caillot Duval, avec un choix de ses lettres les plus étonnantes suivies des réponses de ses victimes" (Paris, 1864, "tirage à petit nombre") accompanies the original "Correspondance" (see Bib# 4701432/Fr# 1249 in this collection).

Fortia de Piles, who regarded Franz Anton Mesmer’s theories of ‘animal magnetism’ as fanciful, was evidently the co-author of an earlier satirical forgery, ‘Correspondance de M. M***** [i.e. Mesmer] sur les nouvelles découvertes du baquet octogone, de l’homme-baquet, et du baquet moral, pouvant servir de suite aux Aphorismes; recueillie et publiée par MM. de F***** [Fortia de Piles] J******** [François de Jourgniac de Saint-Méard] et B******** [Boisgelin de Kerdu]’ (Libourne, 1785), concerning which A. A. Barbier, Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes. (Paris, 1872, vol. I), comments ‘Cette “Correspondance” est imaginaire.’

Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record.