?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 300 - $ 500
Sirven Affair: Two Pamphlets.
Including Pierre-Firmin de Lacroix's Mémoire pour le Sieur Pierre-Paul Sirven, Toulouse: Joseph Dalles, 1770; [and] under the same imprint, Décision de la Faculté de Médecine de Montpellier sur un rapport fait par autorité, & sous les yeux de la justice, d'un cadavre du sexe féminin retiré d'un puids où il avoit séjourné pendant quelques jours, both large octavo and disbound, 7 1/2 x 5 in.
Jean-Paul (sometimes recorded as Pierre-Paul) Sirven's daughter Elisabeth disappeared from her home in Castres, France in March of 1760. Her family was distressed to find that she had been taken without their consent to a Catholic convent in an attempt to turn her away from the Protestant faith. She suffered from a neurological disorder and was returned to her family, but subsequently disappeared again only to be found dead at the bottom of a well in 1762. Her father was charged with murder and sentenced to be burned alive. Her mother was sentenced to death by hanging. The family fled after the sentence, eventually garnering the interest and support of Voltaire, who helped get the entire family pardoned. These pamphlets were published after Sirven surrendered himself to the authorities in 1769, and before he was pardoned in Toulouse in 1771. Voltaire commented, "It only took two hours to sentence a virtuous family to death and it took us nine years to give them justice." (cf. Farenc Jacques, Sirven, d'après Camille Rabaud, Archives du Musée, 1858, Musée du Protestantisme du Haut-Languedoc; https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-sirven-affair/)
Rare at auction; Worldcat showing one copy at the University library in Toulouse containing these two pamphlets bound with three other works related to the Sirven Affair.
