Marie-Catherine Desjardins, who published as Madame de Villedieu, wrote novels, plays and verse in Paris in the 1660s and 1670s and put her own name to them at a time when almost no Frenchwoman did. She made a living from it, which was rarer still. This is volume eight of the collected works a syndicate of Paris booksellers reissued in 1741, sixty years after her death, and it holds Les Exiles, a novel that opens with the poet Ovid banished from the court of Augustus and walking a foreign shore.
It is one volume of a set and the rest are not here. Read on its own it is a whole novel, which is more than most odd volumes can say. The calf is the binding it was sold in, with the gilt still bright on the spine and the headcap chipped where three hundred years of hands pulled it off the shelf.
