184 - [MANUSCRIPT - ANJOU]. A biographical sketch of Abbé Brébion by his oldest friend.

[MANUSCRIPT - ANJOU]. A biographical sketch of Abbé Brébion by his oldest friend. A valuable biographical and epistolary chronicle offering insight into the clergy of Anjou in the late 19th century, notable for its literary erudition and enriched with poignant memories of the War of 1870 and the community at the Collège de Beaupréau. Nantes, May 1881. 1 in-8 volume, bound in midnight blue grained percaline, spine ribbed and accented with a dotted gold fillet and adorned with the title in gold, triple blind-stamped fillets framing the covers, interior blind-stamped roulette. In a midnight blue cardboard slipcase. 361 pages in black ink, numbered on blue-gray ruled paper with borders. As a frontispiece, on a blue paper background, a vintage photographic portrait in visiting-card format. Slipcase shows signs of wear. A unique and unpublished autograph manuscript. It opens, as a frontispiece, with a beautiful oval photographic portrait of Father Alexis-Marie Joseph Brébion (1849–1881) in clerical attire. The anonymous author of this biographical tribute, a direct classmate of the abbot starting in sixth grade at the Collège de Beaupréau, offers a firsthand account. Going beyond the hagiographic framework, this scholar peppers his text with poetic digressions, drawing on Greco-Roman antiquity (Euripides, Sophocles, Horace) and the great masters of literature (Victor Hugo, Madame de Staël) and philosophy (Voltaire, Descartes, Goethe). The work is divided into two parts: - A chronological account of his early life (pp. 1–228). Born in 1849 in Beaupréau and a scholarship recipient of Pope Pius IX, Alexis’s youth was marked by the rescue of his brother in Paris in 1867. During the War of 1870, while his brother died heroically fighting with the Zouaves, Alexis—having been exempted from military service—enlisted as a nurse and ambulance attendant with the Augustinian Sisters of Angers, caring for the wounded and rescuing a soldier under General de Charette. - Collection of Writings and Clerical Career (pp. 229–361). This collection of letters and academic writings documents his ordination (1874), his licentiate degree in Poitiers (1876), and his chair in Rhetoric at Saumur under Bishop Freppel. His letters recount his stays in Guérande and Le Pouliguen—including encounters with the Jesuits in Shanghai, an assault in Nantes (1879), and the châteaux of the Loire Valley. He died suddenly at the age of 31, on a Friday, the eve of Saint Joseph’s Day. A remarkably well-preserved manuscript, in a contemporary binding.