MANUSCRIT Recueil des brevets du régiment de... Lot 41

MANUSCRIT Recueil des brevets du régiment de la Calotte Sold at Momon libraire, 1731. In-4, full speckled calf, spine decorated, red edges. Manuscript frontispiece: "Brevets de la calote (sic)" illustrated with bells, manuscript title, 751, (15) pp. alphabetical table indicating all those who had to undergo the humor of the Calottins. A completely handwritten copy. Enriched with two pages from the Magasin pittoresque devoted to Aymon, 1st generalissimo of the Calotte regiment. Forbidden in the army in 1779, the Calotte passed over, continuing in fact to exist in the military environment at least until the beginning of the 1820s. Charles du Rozoir wrote in 1853: "[The Calotte regiment, a festive and carnivalesque society of military origin, was founded at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, in 1702, by Philippe Emmanuel de La Place de Torsac and Étienne Isidore Théophile Aymon and a few other] merry officers, who had, as it seems, nothing better to do than to make fun of everyone, beginning with themselves. The aim of the Calotte regiment [was] to correct morals, to reform fashionable style by ridiculing it, and to set up a court opposite that of the French Academy. The members of this new company, having foreseen that they would be accused of frivolity because of the difficulty of their enterprise, judged it appropriate to take a lead cap and the name of the Regiment of the Cap. The handwritten collection of the patents of the Calotte regiment, memoirs "of this burlesque regiment are a curious monument of the license of the press. There is no character so high that is not attacked: the regent, Louis XV, Marie Leczinska, are not spared; Law, the cardinal Dubois, the cardinal Fleury, the father Daniel, in a word, the episcopate, the dress and the finance, come in turn to appear on this saddle of the ridicule. Destouches, Terrasson, Moncrif, Lamothe, Fontenelle and all the distinguished men of letters of the time have each their patent and their share of epigram. Above all, the calotte had declared a war to the death on the French Academy. Voltaire, in his Mémoire sur la Satire, published in 1739, speaks with great contempt of the Calotte: it is understandable; he is much maltreated in the Mémoires du régiment. They are not less a precious monument of the spirit of the day at the time of the regency and during the happy years of the reign of Louis XV. One saw in 1814 a reminiscence of the patents of the Calotte in the distribution of the orders of the Éteignoir and the Girouette, made by the editors of the Nain Jaune. Finally, in his funeral oration of Bonaparte, Beuchot has very happily imitated the funeral oration of Sieur de Torsac. Thus, in order to laugh heartily, we must, in this century of gravity, imitate what our fathers did." Ex-libris of the Library of the Baron de Montmorency.