LIEGEARD (Stephen) - Lot 241

LIEGEARD (Stephen) Vingt Journées d'un Touriste au Pays de Luchon. Paris, Hachette, 1874 (Followed by the same author) Une visite aux Monts Maudits (Ascension du Néthou). Paris, Hachette, 1872. Two works in one in-12 volume: 4f., 556pp. ; one folding color map out of text - 2f., 92pp. Some spotting. ½ green basane, gilt title on lightened smooth spine, light rubbing, publisher's covers preserved. (First text): One of the most curious books on Pyreneanism, presenting all its facets. Life in the spas with their picturesque characters, precise descriptions of places, portraits of the mountain folk and, finally, races and climbs in the Luchonais and Néthou regions. LIÉGEARD, as a fashionable but visionary aristocrat, displays a marked contempt for the populace right from the preface, and fears that one day the poetry of beautiful sites will be sullied "under the victuals of picnics". He travelled through the Engadine, Tyrol and the great lakes of northern Italy, about which he wrote a major work in 1877 entitled "A travers l'Engadine" (Through the Engadine). On the Pyrenees, he wrote a "Visite aux Monts Maudits" in 1872 (the second work presented below), and three Pyrenean fragments in verse can be found in the "Verger d'Isaure" of 1870, but 2 of them (La Maladetta and La Vierge du Lac Vert) had previously appeared in an offprint from the Académie des Jeux Floraux, published by Douladoure in 1865 (Labarère 934). (Second text): First issue copy. This "volume" appeared again in 1874 under the title "Vingt Journées d'un Touriste au Pays de Luchon" (Labarère 933).