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Notes d'un voyage dans le midi de la France, par Prosper Mérimée, inspecteur-général des monumens historiques de France

8vo. pp. vi, 484. Half bound in marbled boards. Marbled endpapers. First edition. The first of four accounts for a popular audience published by Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) as a result of his archaeological inspections as the authoritative Inspecteur-Générale des Monuments Historiques from 1833 onward to preserve the nation’s architectural heritage of which a large part had been damaged or destroyed during the French Revolution. The work was rather technical and administrative in nature, containing a dry inventory of buildings, their origins, stylistic traits, and current condition, together with Mérimée's recommendations for action. The book might have been written to gain support for restoration among members of influential committees, scientific and antiquarian societies and to appeal to cultural tourists. See C.W. Thompson, French Romantic Travel Writing: Chateaubriand to Nerval. Oxford, 2011, pp. 308-313. The work records the credulous first-hand notice by Mérimée of a specimen of Chrétin’s Nerac Forgeries, with inscriptional text, at Toulouse (‘mon opinion fut, et est encore, qu’il est réellement antique’: pp. 452-5, with extended reasoning), and much else on disputed Romano-

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