Augustine's Confessions in French, in the translation Robert Arnauld d'Andilly made for the readers around Port-Royal, the abbey that spent the seventeenth century arguing with the crown and the Jesuits about grace. His version sold and kept selling, and the Paris printer Pierre Le Petit reissued it for decades. This copy has lost its title page. The date comes from two later owners who wrote 1669 inside the front cover, one in pencil and one in a long nineteenth-century note about the printer. We have not found a record of a 1669 printing, so it may be a neighbouring year, and the card says so.
It is a small book, made to be carried and read in pieces, and this one was. The calf is worn through at the corners and both ends of the spine, and the marbled endpapers suggest it was rebound a century or so after it was printed. A bookplate for a Commandant Farges is the last owner we can name, and the name is all we have of him.
Somebody sat down with this and filled a whole page about Pierre Le Petit, printer to the king, before writing a word about Augustine. Collectors are like that.
