C.

Faits à l'appuy [sic] de l'existence des Esprits, des Rêves extraordinaires, des Pressentimens [sic] des Sortilèges etc. etc. etc. Author's holograph MS. Produced in Janina.

1818, 1819

1 volume 1 l. + 120 pp. 4to. 211/2 x 151/2 241/2 x 18 cm. Modern vellum binding. Mounted in an interleaved 4to. volume of slightly larger size. The inner margin of the first leaf is damaged and repaired.

Purchased 1936.

The anonymous author was the son of a General under Louis XVI, and was born at Strassburg. After serving in the army during the Napoleonic Wars, he seems to have lived at Janina, and to have been a friend of the infamous Ali Pasha [1741-1822]. On p. 6 he says he was a lieutenant of the 17th Dragoons in 1794, and later a captain in the 2nd Hussars in 1796. In March 1799 (p. 44 et seq.) he was sent by Talleyrand on a confidential mission to Egypt on the armed despatch boat [Aviso] 'Isis', sailing from Genoa. 'Vers la fin du mois de Mai' (p. 46), after a short engagement, very vividly described, his ship was captured by an English blockading squadron off the South coast of Sicily under Admiral [Sir John Thomas] Duckworth [1748-1817]. The 'Isis' had been boarded and taken by the boats of H.M.S. Northumberland under 'le Capitaine Martin' (later Admiral of the Fleet Sir George martin [1764-1847]), but the author was afterwards transferred to H.M.S. Foudroyant, and taken to Palermo, where he remained as a prisoner '

Database description transcribed from S.A.J. Moorat, Catalogue of Western Manuscripts on Medicine and Science in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1962-1973).