BRETON DE LA MARTINIERE, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph.

L'Egypte et la Syrie, ou moeurs, usages, costumes et monumens des Egyptiens, des Arabes et des Syriens. Précédés d'un précis historique . . . Ouvrage orné de quatre-vingt-quatre planches don't une partie a été exécutée d'apres des dessins originaux et inédits, et l'autre d'apres l'ouvrage de Louis Mayer; accompagné de notes et eclaircissements fournis par M. Marcel, Directeur de l'Imprimerie impériale, membre de la commission d'Egypte.

Paris, Nepveu, 1814. 6 vols., 12mo, pp. [iv], xvi, 202, [1]; [iv], 226, [1]; [iv], 254, [1]; [iv], 206; [iv], 249, [1, blank], [1]; [iv]; 269, [1, blank], [1]; with 84 engraved plates (mostly aquatints, wholly or partly coloured by hand), 29 folding; half-titles present; soiling at head of vol. I title and occasionally elsewhere; uncut and partly unopened in near-contemporary cloth-backed boards; with the ownership inscription of Lady Anne Culling Smith on each half-title (see below); the Blackmer copy, with bookplate. First edition. This work ‘is one of many indications of the renewed interest in the Near East after the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt. Known above all as a stenographer, both of parliamentary debates and of criminal trials, Breton de la Martinière also produced similar works on China and Russia. For his book on Egypt and Syria, however, he enlisted the help of Jean-Joseph Marcel, a pupil of Louis-Mathieu Langlès. Marcel, who had taken part in the publication of Langlès’ Recherches asiatiques, had been among the scholars who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt in 1798. He was subsequently appointed director of the national printing press. He supplied Breton de la Martinière not only with information but also with drawings he had made himself in the course of his visit to the east and which Breton de la Martinière added to those of Luigi Mayer published in England over ten years earlier. In his preface Breton de la Martinière praises the achievement of the French in Egypt “où le nom français a laissé de si glorieux souvenirs”. The text, far superior to that in the English edition of Mayer’s Views, gives information about the customs, the religions and the antiquities of the area but also provides details about its more recent history and the French occupation. The tone is strongly anti-British’ (Alastair Hamilton, Europe and the Arab world p. 156).This copy once belonged to Lady Anne Culling Smith (1768–1844), a sister of Arthur Wellesley, first duke of Wellington; see Oxford DNB under Garett Wesley.Blackmer 200; Ibrahim-Hilmy I p. 87; Röhricht 1631.

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