Riddle Me This
[ENIGMAS.]
‘Recueils d’Enigmes’. [France, mid-eighteenth century.]
Manuscript on paper, four vols (discontinuously numbered), 4to, pp. I: [2, index], 62, III: 64, IV: 56, VII: 88, [1, to inside rear cover], with 5 pp. of text (including a 2 pp. index) loosely inserted to vol. III; in French, neatly written in brown ink in a single hand, c. 30 lines per page; lightly toned, some minor damp-staining; pamphlet-stitched in yellow wrappers, edged with blue paper, paper labels to vols I, III, and IV; somewhat worn.
Four manuscript volumes collecting over seven hundred enigmas and riddles from the Mercure de France, the most popular literary magazine of eighteenth-century Paris.
The Mercure de France was perhaps the most influential periodical of the time, disseminating not just news and politics and gossip but also fashion and literature. It became crucial to the diffusion of the enigma as a poetic form, with one or more enigmas and logogryphes (word puzzles) in each issue, and the solutions provided in the following issue. The present enigmas (with the odd logograph) were seemingly copied into notebooks over the span of several years and correspond to material from the Mercure with original publication dates ranging from the 1680s to the 1760s.
A note in the final volume may give a hint to our scribe’s identity, with a chronogram for 1727 hidden in the phrase ‘OsnabrVgI VbI natVs fVIt | Morte pra’CipItI CaDIt’.
See Les Énigmes de Mercure: Base de données des énigmes, logogriphes et charades du Mercure galant et du Mercure de France, 1673–1799 (2019–2022), online.