DU PRÉAU, Mercure Trismégiste , 1549

First edition in French.
Translated into Latin from Greek fragments in 1471 by Marcile Ficino, the writings of Mercury Trismegistus then spread throughout Europe. The French translation from Latin of Henri Estienne's 1505 edition by Gabriel Du Préau is one of the first in the vernacular after the Florentine language edition of 1548.
Gabriel du Préau's work gives thus access in French to the Corpus Hermeticum and the Aesclepius, mystical texts attributed to Mercury Trismegistus, but also to the Crater Hermetis (the basin of Hermes) text by Ludovico Lazarelli.

Bassin d'Hermès, although published as an appendix, is the real key to this book, Du Préau constantly quoting it in his commentary on the Corpus Hermeticum. Text of Christian Kabbalah on the possibility of a "second birth" understood as the transmutation of being by virtue of a gnosis.