Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: In a short prefatory letter, addressed to his brother Fran- ois, Pithou says ' to you Phaedrus owes his existence, since, when he had almost been buried by the injury of time, thanks to the copy discovered by you, I have endeavoured to bring him back to life.' The book is now rare: Hervieux knew of only eleven copies, one of which is in the Bodleian. I have found it of great utility for restoring the text of the fables by the closeness with which it reproduces the MS. Pithou only survived the publication of his Phaedrus by two months. It is disappointing that we do not know certainly where Fraois found the MS. The only indication of its provenance is supplied by a note at the end of Pithou's edition ' uet. ex. Cat.' Orelli supposed, not improbably, that this means ' uetus exemplar Catalaunense (Chalons-sur-Marne) or Catuacense (Douai). The hypothesis of Adry that it came from the Abbey of S. Benoit- sur-Loire has been shown by Hervieux to be wrong. The MS. shortly after Pithou's death was re-collated by Rigault for his edition of 1599J, and by Bongars2, Henri IV's minister plenipotentiary in Germany and intimately connected with Pierre and Fran9ois Pithou. Bongars' collation is now in the library of Bern. That he made it very carefully and was fully aware of the MS.'s unique importance is shown by his note at the end of the last Fable ' Seq. in v. c. libcllus de uariis monstris ac portentis ex fabulis Graecorum et al.3'. The MS. passed eventually into the family of Le Pelletier. In 1780, M. Le Pelletier de Rosambo seems to have allowed Brotier to examine it. During the French Revolution it lay perdu, and fpr some time was not known to be in existence. It was however still in the possession of the Le Pelletiers, and in 1830, its then owner, the Vicompte de Rosambo, allo...