LANGLES Louis-Mathieu Collection Portative de Voyage traduits de différentes langues orientales et européennes.

Brunet III  820; Cohen, 597 ; Gay 3631.

First edition of this collection of four travels. Extremely rare with the sixth volume.

The collection consists of:

– Voyage de l’Inde à la Mekke, par A’bdoûl-Kérym, favori de Tahmas-Qouly-Khân, extrait et traduit de la version anglaise de ses mémoires, avec des notes géographiques, littéraires etc. Paris, Imprimerie de Crapelet, An V- 1797,  in 1 volume.

 – Voyage de la Perse dans l’Inde et du Bengale en Perse, le premier traduit du persan, le second de l’anglais. Paris, Imprimerie de Crapelet, An VI, in 2 volumes.

-Voyage Pittoresque de l’Inde, faits dans les années 1780-1783, par W. Hoges, Paris, Imprimerie de Delance, An XVIII -1805 in 2 volumes

-Voyage chez les Mahrattes, par Feu M. Tone, colonel d’un régiment d’infanterie Maharatte, Traduit de l’anglais par M. M-L., et publié avec des notes sur l’histoire, le gouvernement, les mœurs et usages des Mahrattes, Rédigées en forme de Glossaire, Paris, Imprimerie d’Éverat, 1820, in 1 volume.

Louis-Mathieu Langlès (1763-1824) was a French orientalist, collector, friend of Antoine Isaac Silvester de Sacy, and teacher of Amable Jourdain. He helped found the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes in Paris in 1795, which replaced the École des langues orientales. This school was unique in Europe because it offered instruction based on spoken Oriental languages rather than classical ones. Langlès was appointed to the chair of Persian at this institution. He was also curator of Oriental manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Impériale, later to become the Bibliothèque Nationale, from 1792 until his death in 1824.

These volumes contain not only Langlès’ translations of various accounts of travels in the Orient, but also his valuable annotations. The first is the pilgrimage of Abd al-Karim ibn Aqibat ibn Muhammed Bulaqi al-Kashmiri to Mecca, which was translated into English by Francis Gladwin in 1788.

The second volume contains Langles’ translation of the account of Abd al-Razaq, who was sent as ambassador to India by Shah Rukh, one of Tamburlane’s sons, in the mid-15th century, as well as the memoirs of William Franklin, who travelled in the service of the East India Company from Bengal to Shiraz in 1787 and 1788.

The third volume consists mainly of a translation of the travels in India of the landscape painter William Hodges in the early 1780s and some particularly beautiful plates.

The fourth volume consists of Langlès’s translation of Tone’s Letters. William Henry Tone joined the East India Company in 1792.
In 1796, he entered the service of the Marathas, under the command of the Peshwa in Poona, before being killed in 1802 during military action near the town of Choli Maheshwar. Between 1796 and 1797, Tone sent a memorandum entitled ‘Some Institutions of the Mahratta People’ and three letters dated 18 June, 3 September and 19 December 1796 to Captain Malcolm of the British settlement in Madras. These documents contain first-hand observations of events among the Marathas in 1796 and 1797. They were published by the Courier Press in Bombay in 1798 and again in London the same year.

A charming copy of this rare set, with the sixth volume published 15 years after the fifth volume in the collection.

Traces of a removed bookplate on the verso of the first board of the volumes, a tear in the white margin of page XXV of volume 1, a tear in the text without any missing material on page 115 of volume II, a tear in the text without any missing material on page 143 of volume IV.