Hardcover. Jersey FR, Charles Le Feuvre, 1st thus, 1881, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 420 pages, Green cloth binding with black stamping. Reimpression editee avec de legeres annotations. French text. Previous owner's bookplate, otherwise clean and tight copy.

Hardcover. Los Angeles, Calif., Harry N. Abrams, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover with a dust jacket. This copy is still shrink-wrapped in plastic. Many b&w and color illustrations throughout. Accompanied an exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2001. Examines more than seventy-five paintings and other artworks, representing the Purist movement in twentieth-century modernist art, featuring the works of Le Corbusier, AmTdTe Ozenfant, and Fernand LTger as well as a complete translation of the classic work AprFs le cubisme.

Hardcover. Paris, Arthur Hubschmid, 1st French, 1978, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 2 volumes. French text. 1287 pages total, b&w cartoons. Cream cloth covers. Small smudge on Volumes 1, previous owner's signature on front fly leaf of Volume 2. Else very clean, tight copies.

Softcover. Paris, Jose Corti, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 215 pages, b&w illustrations. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half title page. French text. Wraparound red band with light wrinkle, wear. Otherwise very good.

Hardcover. Paris, E. Plon, Nourrit et C., unknown, n/a, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. French text, 48 color pages, illustrated by M. B. de Monvel. Cover edge wear and light soiling, and spine cracked at front fly leaf, and page 17 but all pages intact. Overall, clean. Covered in plastic protecter that is torn on bottom.

Softcover. Paris, Des Deux Coqs D'or , 1st thus, 1967, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 12 pages stapled, illustrated in color by Richard Scarry. A French language edition (edited) of My Little Golden Book of Manners published in the U.S. in 1962. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Aperture, reprint, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 144 pages. Originally published in French by La Guilde du Livre (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1952) and here reissued by the Aperture Foundation in a first English-language edition, this a profile of life in mid-century rural France by the great American photographer Strand (1890-1976). Following World War II, Strand moved to France and documented its rural areas in photographs. These close-up, seemingly candid images of the people, the countryside, and the architectural structures contain Strand's characteristic style of realism, depth of detail, and innate sensitivity to the environment. To supplement these exquisite pictures, French poet Roy, who knew Strand personally, provides a delightfully lyrical potpourri of poems, commentary, and collages assembled from bits of small-town newspapers. The timeless spirit of the Gallic legacy captured in the photos and words will be savored by Francophiles. Strand's importance in 20th-century photography makes this a highly recommended addition for public libraries and special photography collections.

Softcover. Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 165 pages, French text.

Softcover. France, L'Hartmattan, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 167 pages, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. Text in French and English.

Softcover. Paris, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 1st thus, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 540 pages. FRENCH TEXT. Name on front fly leaf otherwise clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. New York, Calla Editions, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 208 pages. Hardcover with dust jacket. A very clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket edges. This deluxe large-format volume presents scores of sumptuous color illustrations from La Vie Parisienne's heyday, the years between 1917 and 1922. Consisting chiefly of cover designs and editorial cartoons, the images abound in chic young beauties in fanciful and occasionally risque tableaux. Many of these illustrations have not been readily available for nearly a century, making this compilation of particular interest and value to lovers of graphic art and Parisian culture.

Hardcover. London, Chapman & Hall, 1st, 1912, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 312 pages. 16 B&W illustrations. Brown cover with gilt title to spine. Sun-fading and spotting. Unfinished front edge. Heavy foxing to all edges. Ex-Lib sticker on front end page. Tissue-protected frontispiece. Soiling to end pages. Overall, a clean, tight copy. A biography of Agnes Sorel, known by the sobriquet Dame de beaute, was a favorite and chief mistress of King Charles VII of France, by whom she bore four daughters. She is considered the first officially recognized royal mistress of a French king.

Softcover. NY, John Wiley & Sons, 1st pbk, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover,452 pages, b&w illustrations. Harlow Unger's Lafayette is a remarkable and dramatic account of a life as fully lived as it is possible to imagine, that of Gilbert de Motier, marquis de Lafayette. To American readers Unger's biography will provide a stark reminder of just how near run a thing was our War of Independence and the degree to which our forefathers' victory hinged on the help of our French allies, marshaled for George Washington by his 'adopted' son, Lafayette. But even more absorbing and much less well known to the general reader will be Unger's account of Lafayette's idealistic but naive efforts to plant the fruits of the American democracy he so admired in the unreceptive soil of his homeland. Short inscription to half-title page, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Montreal, Poirier, Bessette & Co., unk., 1893, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 546 pages, many b&w illustrations including maps and fold-outs. Binding is shaken and both covers loose with cracked hinges, front fly leaf loose. Internally good. Leather spine and corners with pink pebbled cloth covers, marled end papers.

Hardcover. London, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle Rivington, 1st, 1885, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 328 pages, frontispiece engraving of Napoleon. Chronicles the political intrigue that propelled Napoleon from military leader to Emperor. Bound in three-quarter black leather over blue cloth, raised bands on spine, gilt decorations and lettering on spine. Top edge gilt, light corner wear.

Softcover. Paris, La Caravelle, 1st, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 169 pages, color frontispiece, b&w text illustrations by Andre Margat. INSCRIBED BY ALI-BERT on front fly leaf to American scholar and professor Stephen Freeman, dated 1945. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Paris, Juvisy, 1st, 1935, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 1Softcover, 69 pages, 9 b&w text illustrations by Andre Margat. INSCRIBED BY ALI-BERT on front fly leaf to American scholar and professor Stephen Freeman, dated 1945. Clean, tight copy.

Softcover. Paris, Librairie Floury, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, gray wrappers with black and red lettering, 213 pages. Illustrated with black & white plates. Small tears at foot and crown of paper spine. Clean, tight copy. FRENCH TEXT.

Softcover. Paris FR, Centre National de la Photo Graphie, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 unnumbered pages, 40 b&w plates. FRENCH TEXT. The panoramic photography of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, taken between 1922 and 1929; the catalogue for an exhibition. Wonderful work. Text by Michel Frizot. Unpaginated, 40 full-page duo-toned b&w plates; 11 x 10.25 inches. Bibliography, chronology, exhibitions list.

Hardcover. France, Presses De La Oite, 1st Ltd. ed., 1959, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, #996 of 1,500 Ltd Ed. of a speech given by the author in 1958. Slipcased. FRENCH TEXT

Softcover. Paris, Saint-Germain-Des-Pres, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 56 pages, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on half-title page. French text.

Softcover. Bibliotheque de l'Image, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Oversize softcover, 63 pages, French text with color illustrations throughout. Cover edge and spine fade and previous owner's embossed stamp on title page, otherwise, very clean and tight copy.

Softcover. Paris, Mercvre de France, 1st, 1958, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 265 pages. INSCRIBED TO ROGER SHATTUCK BY AUTHOR ON FRONT ENDPAPER. With black & white illustrations by: Pablo Picasso, Jean Bazaine, Jacques Villon, Antoni Clave, and others. Spine paper with light sun fading. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1st, 1980, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 214 pages. Hardcover. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Edited by Robert Phelps, these letters, averaging three per day, prove that Colette was her own best character.

Hardcover. Hanover, NH, University Press of New England , reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 195 pages. hardcover with dust jacket. Blue cloth boards with gilt lettering along spine. Dust jacket his shelf worn with fading to spine. Otherwise, tight clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, reprint, 1882, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcovers, two-volume set complete. Matching dark brown cloth covers stamped in black and gilt, top edge gilt. 639; vi, 653 pages; index, bibliography, frontispiece portrait in each volume - one a quite formal portrait of Voltaire in his prime, the other a sketch of him in old age. Covers show light wear, name on title pages. This is the second printing, the first published a year earlier. A comprehensive life of the great Enlightenment writer. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. Akron, OH, Saalfield Publishing, 1st, 1917, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Non-paginated. Softcover with light wear to paper wrappers. Moderat soil throughout. Tight booklet binding.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 239 pages. This book tells for the first time the long and complex story of the involvement of Locke's suggestion that God could add to matter the power of thought in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in the growth of French materialism. There is a discussion of the 'affaire de Prades', in which Locke's name was linked with a censored thesis at the Faculty of Theology in Paris. The similarities and differences between English "thinking matter" and the French "mati`ere pensante" of the philosophes are also discussed. Name o front fly leaf, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, The Voltaire Foundation, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover in blue cloth, gilt lettering on spine, 251 pages. As France moved from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, it found itself in the grip of anglomanie - a fascination with new English ideas in the domains of science and philosophy. Chief among the English thinkers it enthusiastically embraced was John Locke. On his visits to France and in his personal correspondence, Locke interacted with prominent French thinkers, scientists and savants of the day, such as Charles Barbeyrac and Pierre Magnol, and his works engaged in a critical dialogue with those of Descartes. However, Locke has been feted to such an extent that his position in the history of ideas in France is often overlooked. In Locke in France 1688-1734, Ross Hutchison re-examines and re-contextualises the precise nature and extent of Locke's influence in France by exploring how his ideas were incorporated into contemporary French debates and controversies in the transitional period from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. Hutchison highlights the various channels of dissemination which brought Locke to the attention of the French, including translations of his major works and his personal friendships with French Protestant exiles. Hutchison also presents case studies of interactions in which Lockean ideas played a dominant role in the evolution of French thought, ranging from political theory to the nature of language, theories of education, and the relation between soul and matter. Clean copy, no dust jacket.

Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1953, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a worn dust jacket with a chunk gone from rear panel, 309 pages. This book gives a complete account of all that Locke saw, did and heard during his four years in France. The entries vary from laconic jottings to detailed accounts - full of colour and wit - of life in Paris and the provinces. Locke's variety of interests presents a vivid and thorough account of France at that time. He observed and recorded the absolutism of Louis XIV and the poverty of the peasants, the growing persecution of the Protestants and the external manifestations of Catholicism, recent developments in science and technology - even agricultural methods and the system of taxes. So that this is a book for the general reader as well as for the student of Locke, the social historian and the historian of science. Three b&w plates including a map of his travels. Name on front fly leaf, rubber withdrawn stamp on copyright page, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Paris, Moutard, 1st, 1789, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, leatherbond, chipped and worn, marbled endpapers, 336 pages. Vol. 1 only (of 4). FRENCH TEXT. Interior pages very good. Anquetil (1723 - 1806) became prior of the abbey of La Roee, in Anjou, in 1759 and soon after was appointed director of the college of Senlis, where he taught history and theology. He published this work just on the eve of the French Revolution (the Approbation is dated 30 September 1788) and was imprisoned during the Terror for his troubles.

Hardcover. New York, WW Norton & Company, Inc, 1st Edition, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 678 pages. Hardcover. B/w illustrations throughout. A few specs of foxing to front flyleaf and back page, otherwise pages clean. Dust jacket has some agewear with a touch of chipping and foxing, one small tear on back dj. Decorated endpapers. Red cloth cover boards, gilt title on spine, some spots to covers.

Hardcover. Paris, France, Vilo, 1st, 1967, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, 72 pages. Hardcover. FRENCH TEXT. B/w illustrations throughout. Decorated glossy cover boards, some chipping of lamination at spine and corners, a couple scratch marks. Previous owner's bookplate on front endpaper. Back cover boards slightly warped so it curls just a touch at top and bottom. Pages clean. Binding tight. A beautifully photo-illustrated volume featuring performance photos and portraits of the world-famous prima ballerina.

Hardcover. New York, Robert M. McBride & Co., 5th pr., 1927, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 173 pages. Illustrated with b&w plates. 12mo. Dark blue cloth, gilt titles on spine.

Hardcover. NY, Bloomsbury , 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, pictorial boards with wrap-around dust jacket band with title. 403 pages, color and b&w illustrations. Claude Monet's water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. The dramatic history behind these paintings is little known; Ross King's Mad Enchantment tells the full story for the first time and, in the process, presents a compelling and original portrait of one of our most popular and cherished artists. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, St. Martin's Press, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 330 pages, b&w illustrations. Paris in the 1920s was bursting with talent in the worlds of art, design and literature. The city was at the forefront of everything new and exciting; there was no censorship; life and love were there for the taking. At its center was the gorgeous, seductive English socialite Nancy Cunard, scion of the famous shipping line. Her lovers were legion, but this book focuses on five of the most significant and a lifelong friendship. Her affairs with acclaimed writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Louis Aragon were passionate and tempestuous, as was her romance with black jazz pianist Henry Crowder. Her friendship with the famous Irish novelist George Moore, her mother's lover and a man falsely rumored to be Nancy's father, was the longest-lasting of her life. Cunard's early years were ones of great wealth but also emotional deprivation. Her mother Lady Cunard, the American heiress Maud Alice Burke (who later changed her name to Emerald) became a reigning London hostess; Nancy, from an early age, was given to promiscuity and heavy drinking and preferred a life in the arts to one in the social sphere into which she had been born. Highly intelligent, a gifted poet and widely read, she founded a small press that published Samuel Beckett among others. A muse to many, she was also a courageous crusader against racism and fascism. She left Paris in 1933, at the end of its most glittering years and remained unafraid to live life on the edge until her death in 1965. Remainder dot top edge otherwise clean.

Hardcover. New York, Abrams/Menil Foundation, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 352 pages, 470 illustrations, 340 in color. Crisp, clean copy in a bright dust jacket.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st, 1970, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 350 pages, B&w frontispiece of Houssaye. A condensation of his six-volume Confessions. Entertaining observations of nineteenth century Parisian life, culture and government. Clean copy in a lightly worn dust jacket.

Softcover. New York, Delano Greenidge Editions, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 104 pages. Softcover. Black and white photographs. Light edgewear to wrappers. May Ray's iconic black and white photographs, originally published in Paris and New York in 1934. Introduction in English with French, German, Spanish, and Italian translations. Includes bibliography.

Hardcover. La Fabrica, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Like new in publishers shrink-wrap. Hardcover, 391 pages, profusely illustrated. This excellent catalog contributes a wealth of new information, providing a valuable contribution to our understanding of Man Ray. The treasure trove of images and objects collected here is drawn from the large archives of the Man Ray Trust in Long Island, New York, and includes little known early works, documents and objects from his private life, working drawings and sketches for major works as well as innumerable familiar masterpieces.

Softcover. NY, Rizzoli, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 190 pages. The Manual of St-Germain-des-Pres is a "guide" to the legendary creative and intellectual playground of mid-20th-century Paris. With boundless energy and a delicious sense of humor, Boris Vian takes readers on a star-studded romp through the underground culture of jazz clubs, Left Bank cafes, surrealist and existentialist literature, and the various eccentrics and artists that made up this legendary scene. Paris in the '50s was an incredible place and time: With the end of the war, everything seemed possible. The list of luminaries Vian ran with, and who are captured here in previously unpublished photographs, includes Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Juliette Greco, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Jacques Prevert, and Jean Cocteau. Clean copy.

NY, Abrams, 1st, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 120 pages, 93 b&w plates. This volume is a retrospective of the work of famed French photographer Marc Riboud. Photographs from Paris, China, Vietnam, and the Middle East are included. Printed in rich duotone, spanning the years from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. Clean, in a bright dust jacket.

Hardcover. New Haven CT, Yale University Press/Barnes Foundation, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, pictorial boards with a white cloth spine. This book offers a long-overdue reassessment of the career of the Parisian-born artist Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), who moved seamlessly between the Cubist avant-garde and lesbian literary and artistic circles, as well as the realms fashion, ballet, and decorative arts. Critical essays explore her early experiments with Cubism; her exile in Spain during World War I; her collaborative projects with major figures of her time such as Andre Mare, Serge Diaghilev, Francis Poulenc, and Andre Groult; and her role in the emergence of a "Sapphic modernity" in Paris in the 1920s. Along with more than 60 full-color plates, Laurencin's life and career are documented through an illustrated chronology and exhibition history, as well as an appendix charting her network of female patrons and associates. Laurencin became a fixture of the contemporary art scene in pre-World War I Paris, including as a muse and romantic partner of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. She returned to the city after the war, having developed her signature style of diaphanous female figures in a blue-rose-gray palette. Laurencin's feminine yet sexually fluid aesthetic defined 1920s Paris, and her work as an artist and designer met with high demand, with commissions by Ballets Russes and Coco Chanel, among others. Her romantic relationships with women inspired homoerotic paintings that visualized the modern Sapphism of contemporary lesbian writers like Nathalie Clifford Barney. Indeed, one of Laurencin's final projects was to illustrate the poems of Sappho in 1950.

Hardcover. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 356 pages. One of the world's largest tyre makers and an international corporation with interests in countries around the world, Michelin is also a uniquely French company, one that throughout its history has closely identified itself with the country's people and culture. In the process, it has helped shape the self-image of 20th-century France. This volume offers a provocative history of the company and its innovative advertising campaigns between 1898, when Bibendum - the company's iconic "Michelin Man" - was first introduced, to 1940, when France fell to the Nazis and the company's top executive, Edouard Michelin, died. Both events indelibly changed the company and the national context in which it operated. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Durham NC, Duke University Press, 1st, 2008, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth with magenta gilt lettering on spine, 269 pages, b&w illustrations. Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of Frances leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Genevive Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinemas formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they wrote in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema.Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. No dust jacket, Clean copy.

Hardcover. University Park, Pennsylvania State Univ Press, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Two hardcover volumes in bright dust jackets. Professor Armi posits that the great third abbey at Cluny is the building where regional masons of different traditions first combined their talents to develop a new design, and that the artisans responsible for the masonry also created its sculpture. Volume I Text, 204 pages; Volume II contains 238 b/w Illustrations.

Hardcover. NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1st, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 260 pages. Throughout his long career, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) continually expanded the boundaries of his art. By repeating images in pairs, trios, and series, he conducted an ongoing dialogue with his earlier works in order to, as he put it, "push further and deeper into true painting." In this fresh approach to a much-studied artist, prominent scholars from the United States and Europe examine more than sixty works in concise chapters that focus on this aspect of Matisse's working process. From early pairs such as Young Sailor I and II (1907-8) through a series of late studio scenes from Venice (1946-48), Matisse is shown revisiting a given theme with the aim of devising innovative, often radical, solutions to such problems as how to portray light, handle paint, select colors, and manipulate perspective.New technical studies of the early paired works and photographs documenting the evolution of his later paintings help to elucidate Matisse's complex evolution. In numerous excerpts from letters and interviews, he is revealed as an artist who regularly questioned himself and his methods, a man of powerful intellect who regarded each new painting as an adventure. A significant addition to art historical literature, Matisse: In Search of True Painting is a revelatory study of a seminal figure in 20th-century modernism.

Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton & Company, 1st US, 1894, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcovers, Three volumes complete, blue cloth hardcovers with gilt titles and oval decorations on the front covers. Gilt titles and decorations on the spines. Top edges gilt. Volume I: 421 pages, [4] pages advertisements, Volume II: 484 pages, [8] pages advertisements, Volume III: 541 pages, [2] pages advertisements. Illustrated with frontispieces in the three volumes. Illustrations and folding facsimile autographs and manuscripts. Previous owner's inscriptions written on inside front cover of Vol. 1, Otherwise a bright, clean set. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO WEIGHT, DOMESTIC SHIPPING ONLY.

Softcover. NY, Seven Stories Press, reprint, 2012, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 431 pages. A fascinating document of an extraordinary life, Memoirs of A Breton Peasant reads with the liveliness of a novel and bristles with the vigor of an opinionated autodidact from the very lowest level of peasant society. Brittany during the nineteenth century was a place seemingly frozen in the Middle Ages, backwards by most French standards; formal education among rural society was either unavailable or dismissed as unnecessary, while the church and local myth defined most people's reasoning and motivation. Jean-Marie Deguignet is unique not only as a literate Breton peasant, but in his skepticism for the church, his interest in science, astronomy and languages, and for his keen--often caustic--observations of the world and people around him. Born into rural poverty in 1834, Deguignet escapes Brittany by joining the French Army in 1854, and over the next fourteen years he fights in the Crimean war, attends Napoleon III's coronation ceremonies, supports Italy's liberation struggle, and defends the hapless French puppet emperor Maximilian in Mexico. He teaches himself Latin, French, Italian and Spanish and reads extensively on history, philosophy, politics, and literature. He returns home to live as a farmer and tobacco-seller, eventually falling back into dire poverty. Throughout the tale, Deguignet's freethinking, almost anarchic views put him ahead of his time and often (sadly, for him) out of step with his contemporaries. Deguignet's voluminous journals (nearly 4,000 pages in total) were discovered in a farmhouse in Brittany a century after they were written. This narrative was drawn from them and became a surprise bestseller when published in France in 1998. Clean copy.