The odd story of the Metatrou book

The Metatrou is a very strange story set in the history of the year 1515. It takes place during the French Renaissance, the first year of the reign of King Francis I of France. All the works have been collected in four books by a certain Pierre de Colines. Here begins this bizarre adventure.

The opus is about the heroic deeds and sayings of Jean le Quinze. Despite many historical facts, it is a marvelous romance. The stories stand outside other things, a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of baseness and nobility, of the impossible and the obvious.

The volume is annotated "How I win a living and lost a fortune." and "The Métatrou is an abyss between two mountains of soul." After being amused, we may return to enter more fully into its meaning. Here is an allegory that intends to represent the strength of happy fools and hollow heads.

How did this book end up in my hands? It all began a few years ago at a flea market in Torino, in Italy, there I fell in "Métatrou" at the bend of bric-a-brac that sold old books by the kilo. There were a lot of 19th-century volumes there and a few older ones in various formats. Pell-mell, shattered bindings and scratched covers, interior booklets swollen and warped by humidity, pages bitten by time. Here, books were sold for the decorative object they had become, as many of the stories told in their pages had become obsolete. The disinterest of our modern times, old French and Italian language, many illegible characters, or damaged pages did not make reading easier.

There, I acquired this book. Perhaps because it was the oldest of the lot or, even more than the object, there was a word on the book spine: Métatrou. Having the book of Metatrou would certainly be great chitchat at a dinner party. The word was logorrhea and struck my imagination, a world was opening up to me. From the very little I read, kneeling on the floor, wide passages had already filled my soul. There were certainly in these pages some bon vivant in sleep. All the protagonists seemed to escape from the Ship of fools. It was here, a truly tasty dysfunctional crew with epic surnames like Batonclou, Salsicius, Cassebol, Hiboust, or Boufegrain. I bought this attractive object by weight, 1140 grams, negotiated at the price of a kilo.

This book is a second enriched edition, copied from the original printing. The front page of the book states that it was published in Lyon, in Confort street, in the year 1715. It will therefore have made its way to Italy, just like Pierre de Colines, two centuries earlier. Indeed, according to the author's biography, Pierre left Lyon at the beginning of the fifteenth century, to go to the valleys of Piedmont via the Swiss Alps. In this reprint, it is said that the story has been embellished with some engravings and cartographies and that the publisher has made a point of giving this chronicle its rightful place. It is these texts that I am publishing nowadays.

According to the clues found in the volume, the first edition of these fairy tales could be a post-incunabulum. It seems that the original contained the deeds of a Swiss condottiere named Jean le Quinze. The last year of the heroic life of a captain contracted during the Italian wars to command a mercenary company. Throughout the pages, one reads the anecdotes, from various storytellers, that were then collected, published, and printed by Pierre de Colines in Lyon, probably during the troubles of La Grande Rebeyne that hit the city hard in 1529, or during the years that followed. As a result, there is little information on the circumstances that led to the publication of this four-part volume. No copy of this first edition is known, no mention has been found in public libraries.

This old book looks to be the last witness of a lost kingdom. Welcome to the Metatrou !