DAILY LIFE IN PARIS

(MERCIER, LOUIS SEBASTIEN).

Tableau de Paris, 2 vols.

Hamburg, Samuel Fauche, 1781.

8vo. Uncut in the original blue boards with white paper title-label to spine. Wear to extremities. Boards and edges of boards with scratches. Internally very fine and clean. XIV, 400 pp.; (4), 354, (2) pp. 

First edition of the two first volumes of Mercier’s vivid and colorful description of daily life in Paris: "There is no better writer to consult if one wants to get some idea of how Paris looked, sounded, smelled, and felt on the eve of the Revolution." (Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 118).
A third and fourth volume was published in 1781 and fifth to eights in 1783 – the first two volumes being the rarest.

Order-nr.: 61123