A COLLECTION OF STYLE MANUALS, DEDICATED TO HUGUENOT PRINCESSES. Small 8vo. (6), 4-118 ff; (10), 156 pp; 42 ff. With separate title-pages for Les Marguerites Françoises, ou Seconde Partie des fleurs du Bien-dire… (1606) and Les Marguerites des Lieux Communs, et excellentes Sentences… (1605). Bound in near-contemporary flexible vellum, borders gilt ruled, with gilt garland stamped in center, and spine in 5 compartments with a gilt floral motif. 20th century ex-libris of Henri Joseph Francotte on pastedown, with price (?) “500, Dec. ‘45”. 18th century signature and later bibliographical note in ink on flyleaf. Some toning to textblock, otherwise very good.Extremely rare, early collected edition of three unusual manuals of loci communes, mainly on the subjects of love, jealousy, infidelity, and so on; the works are separately dedicated to two different female pillars of the Huguenot community in the wake of Henri IV’s assassination. Often proffering cynical advice for enabling escape from socially awkward epistolary situations, the works explore tropes of both male and female conduct, as well as offering a window onto the source of the innumerable witty aphorisms which correspondents of both sexes seem to have reveled in during the Early Modern period. The first work is dedicated to the ‘soeur unique du Roy’, i.e. the staunch Calvinist Catherine de Bourbon (1570-1604/5). The anonymous author (signing the preface ‘M. G.’) calls Catherine herself a fleur and hopes that his petite work will be of use to her: Catherine herself was a writer of sonnets, mainly unpublished (cf Ritter, Lettres et poésies de Catherine de Bourbon). It begins with a foundational example of a lover writing an exculpatory letter: Helen of Troy, the locus classicus of feminine infidelity. Here, she manages to castigate Paris for kidnapping her while at the same time justifying her own infidelity. Next, the text moves onto perhaps typical Early Modern scenarios: a lover “excuses himself for not having written to his Lady for some private reasons she knows perfectly well, and regrets that his absence pained her far too cruelly”; a selection of “Lettres passionnés d’une dame extrêmement amoureuse”; a brush-off “to a lady who has long been in love with him”; a letter claiming that a pestering mother has delayed his response to yesterday’s letter from her; and so on. The second work is dedicated to the (10-year old, but already married) Marguerite de Béthune (1595-1660), probably due to the death in 1604 of Catherine de Bourbon. This and the third work organize useful but unattributed aphorisms on any possible subject relating to courtship and love alphabetically, from ABSENCE, ACCUSER, and ADIEUX to UNION, VOLONTÉ, and YEUX. From these the reader can cobble together ‘piecemeal’ almost an entire letter to placate or excite his/her lover. The latter two works are attributed on their title-pages to François Des Rues (1575-1633). Barbier also applies this to the first work, but Brunet disagrees. The earliest edition of the Fleurs seems to date to perhaps 1598. The Second Partie seems to have first appeared in 1603; and the earliest edition of the Marguerites des Lieux Communs we can trace bears the date 1604. All early editions are extremely rare in census, with the following holdings traced in US libraries after an exhaustive OCLC search: 1598: Chicago 1603: Huntington, Yale 1606: South Carolina, U Washington 1608: Yale, Michigan, UCLA, Illinois 1614: Folger 1624: Huntington 1637: Newberry * Kelso, Doctrine for the Lady of the Renaissance, 277-279 (citing 1595 as the first ed. of the Fleurs); cf also the Nouvelle Biographie Generale XIII, 907; and Louis Morin, Essai bibliographique sur les ouvrages de Francois Desrues (1925), p. 55, no. 8 (Fleurs); p. 45, no. 1 (Marguerites) p. 44, no. 1 (Lieux communs).