The Green Box of Monsieur de Sartine, found at Madamoiselle Du The’s lodgings. From the French of the Hague Edition. Revised and Corrected by those of Leipsic and Amsterdam

8vo. pp. 51, [1]. Signatures: [A]4 B-F4 G2. Disbound, in a morocco-backed folding case.

This famous imposture, by the playwright and satirist (and author of Anticipation, a 1778 mock-oration by George III) described by T. J. Matthias as ‘the happiest of any occasional writer in his day,’ purports to present a selection of diplomatic and personal papers, mostly relating to the American Revolution and its European consequences, found in the ‘casette verte’ of the forgetful Hispano-French statesman, Antoine de Sartine, left at the home of his inamorata, Mme. de The. Included among the discoveries (all imaginary, i.e., forgeries) are letters of Maurepas, Necker (‘Neckar’), Vergennes, Marie Antoinette, and two from ‘Benjamin Franklin,’ one of them as ‘ambassador plenipotentiary of the United Free States of America,’ enraged at the disrespect he encounters at Paris (‘I hear Washington ridiculed in Russian, and myself in all the jargon of Germany’). And among payments listed under ’Secret Service Money’ are advances to Franklin of 130,000 livres, ‘till the arrival of his tobacco fleet’, and 5000 more toward the purchase of a sword, ‘ordered by Congress for Marquis de Lafayette’, 100,000 livres to Silas Deane ‘for his transportation [back] to America’, and 600,000 (!) for pictorial snuffboxes for American congressmen, and a coffret of ‘the rouge her Majesty uses […] for my Lady Washington’.

Despite the title page notice of prior (non-existent) printings at Leipzig and Amsterdam, and the claim by the fictitious ‘finder’ that when publishing the papers (in French) ‘he thought it advisable to retire [from France] to Holland,’ the original text (in English) was first issued by A. Becket and R. Faulder in 1779 in London at 1 s. 6 d., in 72 well-spaced pages, the sheets being reissued four times as ‘The Second [through Fifth] Edition’, all with the same date and text. Some of these advertise on the verso of the last leaf a French version ( ‘La Casette Verte De Monsieur de Sartine’, now known only in from a ‘Cinquième’ or ‘Sixième’ edition, with the imprint ‘A La Haye, chez la Veuve Whiskerfeld,’ but clearly printed in London, which is of course not the source but a retrospective translation, although many commentators persist in misterming the English original itself the ‘translation’: see T.R. Adams, The American Controversy. Providence, R.I., 1980, II, pp. 678-79, eds. 79-107a-k, especially the note to 79-107g. The Becket-Faulder English printing, in all five ‘editions or issues,’ is clearly the first, followed by a piracy at Dublin (Adams 79-107m) and the present, entirely re-set and neatly compressed to pp. 51 (Adams 79-107l), is by far the rarest of all.

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