Pantin, et Pantine, Conte

Paris: “chés tout le monde, à la Folie, 1747. 12mo (156 x 86 mm). Engraved frontispiece and engraved title, 179, [1 blank] pp Woodcut tailpiece, type-ornament headpiece and passe-partout initial. Occasional dropped letters apparently from uneven inking; one word printed upside down and with letters out of order (!, p. 113). (Minor discoloration and dust-soiling, occasional marginal dampstain.) Contemporary speckled sheep, sides blind-paneled, spine gold-tooled in compartments with red morocco gilt lettering-piece, board edges gold-tooled, edges stained red, marbled endpapers, green ribbon marker (joints abraded).***

First edition of a rare fairy tale spoof of the vogue for pantins, or cardboard jumping-jacks, which swept Paris in the mid-1740s. These formerly children’s toys suddenly became ubiquitous: “Pantins hung conveniently in drawing-rooms and sitting-rooms to amuse visitors and to while away tedious hours.... People also carried Pantins in their pockets and bags and enjoyed them in public.... New Pantins were constantly being brought out and every shop tried to have the latest novelty.... [Edmond Jean François] Barbier gives a very good account of the craze in his Journal [historique et anecdotique du règne de Louis XV]: `At first the Pantins were designed for children’s toys; but after a time they were used to amuse the entire public. They were little figures made of pasteboard. All the parts of the body were separate and were attached by strings at the back of the figure. When these strings were pulled ... the Pantin could be made to dance. These little figures represented Harlequin, Scaramouche, Mitron, Shepherds, Shepherdesses, etc., and were consequently painted in all kinds of ways... You could not go into any house in January 1747, without finding a Pantin hanging by the mantelpiece’.... Of course, the moralists and satirists had much to say about this silly amusement of the upper classes” (E. Singleton, Dolls [New York, 1927], pp. 39-41).

In his dedicatory letter “to the public,” the author, a playwright, novelist, and souffleur (prompter) at the Théâtre italien, some of whose plays were performed by marionettes, muses on the eternal return. Fashion being a circular phenomenon — vertugadins, for example, having vanished only to be replaced by paniers (two terms for farthingales) — he declares that pantins, those little marionettes moved by strings, are simply a new incarnation of the Romans’ Penates. (To prove this he argues that one traditional [erroneous] etymology of the word, penes nos nati [”those born among us”] is an anagram of Pantins and pantines ...). The only difference, says L’Affichard, is that the ancients superstitiously attributed powers to those household gods, while we, enlightened, simply derive amusement from our Pantins. He predicts that “the reign of the Pantins will pass, just as did that of the Bilboquet, which was in all hands throughout France in 1712” (pp. 7-8).

This kind of silliness continues in the plot: the all-powerful fairy Bichette falls improbably in love with the infant Pantin, son of Druidos, chief priest of the goddess Isis; disguising herself as a governess, Bichette ingratiates herself with Pantin’s parents and eventually spirits him off to her magic castle, where she keeps her daughter Lisbette. She strictly instructs the two to love each other only as brother and sister (thus announcing the suite to the reader). The irruption of the brutish giant Attilas, Bichette’s ex-lover and Lisbette’s father, brings the first whiffs of danger; as gluttonous Attilas lurches for a yummy meal of young flesh, in the form of his own daughter, Bichette turns the children into marionettes — temporarily at first ... And so on. Love turns the tables and after various adventures, including isles of pleasure, sex scenes not meant for children’s eyes, and deer speaking with German accents, intergenerational passions are straightened out.

The unsigned frontispiece shows the giant Attilas confronting Bichette (or her maid Nabotte), who holds aloft the two children as pantins; another tiny pantin is held by a putto on the engraved (or etched) title.

The references to the bilboquet in the dedication and the imprint are to an earlier French toy-craze, the cup-and-ball As noted above, L’Affichard dates the bilboquet craze to 1712 in his preface, thus “Year 35 of the Bilboquet” is 1747. It is also a tribute to Marivaux, whose little-known (and extremely rare) story Le bilboquet was published in 1714 (cf. Rubelin).

The work was reprinted in 1750 in vol. 6 of La Bibliothèque choisie et amusante, and again separately in 1751 (Amsterdam: Michel) under the title Les amusemens spirituels des frivoles ou Pantin et Pantine, conte spirituel. Quérard noted a 1745 edition under that title, apparently a ghost.

OCLC locates only one copy of this edition west of the Atlantic (Thomas Fisher Library), and no American copies of either of its later 18th-century appearances.

Barbier III: 770; Brunet, Imprimeurs imaginaires et libraires supposés, p. 189; Quérard, La France littéraire I, p. 13 (citing Les Amusemens only); Jones, A List of French Prose Fiction, p. 94; Cohen-de Ricci 782 (misdated). Cf. Marivaux Le Bilboquet (Paris, 1995), preface by F. Rubelin, pp. 36-37. (Inventory #: 4390)