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Photo [MANUSCRIT] MAHOT, Maurice. 

Original manuscript of an unpublished botanical treatise by a learned scholar from Nantes.
It presents botanical concepts as well as the classifications of Linnaeus and Tournefort. This manuscript, nearly 200 pages long, is written on the verso of the plates from Buc'hoz’s Flore Lorraine.
All plates are also annotated with details on plant names, their classification according to Linnaeus and Tournefort, and their medicinal uses—together forming a true pharmacopoeia.
These 187 plates were intended to illustrate Buc'hoz’s Traité historique des plantes qui croissent dans la Lorraine et les Trois-Évêchés, published in ten octavo volumes between 1762 and 1770. The plates, originally issued separately in installments and designed to be folded and bound in octavo, are gathered here in a single folio volume.
Buc'hoz, known for the beauty of his plates, had solicited financial support from fellow countrymen and botany enthusiasts for the production of these engravings. Thus, at the bottom of almost every plate, one finds the coat of arms and name of the sponsor who funded it.
Maurice Mahot, the author of this manuscript, sponsored plate 152.
While biographical information on Maurice Mahot “the elder” (1745–1810), a royal counselor, civil and criminal judge at the présidial, alderman (1777), and deputy mayor of Nantes (1779), offers little indication of an interest in natural sciences and botany, the same cannot be said of his son, Maurice Mahot “the younger” (1774–1842), a doctor of medicine and scholar who published several books on medicine and lexicography.
The annotations by the son—a physician—on the plates funded by the father—a botany enthusiast—explain the numerous pharmaceutical and medical recipes found in the work.
Another collector has left his name on the title page: Silas Boucher de la Ville Jossy, a member of a prominent Nantes family in the mid-19th century.
A fascinating manuscript, still largely unexplored, of exceptional character, both for the beauty of its annotated plates and for its content, which intertwines botanical classification and pharmacopoeia.

Photo [MANUSCRIT]. 

Very rare manuscript of spiritualist session reports.
The spiritualist wave arrived in France in 1854, and spread to all walks of life. We will remember, for example, the famous sessions of Victor Hugo in Guernsey...
In the following decades, all bourgeois families tried to turn the tables or dance. Methods of spiritualist contact are becoming more refined, we are seeing automatic writing methods appear in the presence or absence of a medium.

Very few of the sessions from this period have left written traces; the manuscript we present is the transcription of automatic writing sessions that took place between October 1866 and March 1867 in the Moret family. The first sessions took place in the presence of the medium Ms. Parain then in Bordeaux with the help of Ms. Benoit. Mrs. X. (unidentified) first contacted her grandfather Louis Pierre Moret. This is also why she transcribed the content of her communications in this notebook which belonged to her grandfather. The first communications are short, but little by little the mind gains confidence and the communications are longer. It was then his mother Marie Louise Moulins who “took up” the pen, then his father Moret. It is also amusing to note that the signatures of the spirits gradually become different.

The spirits advise their descendants to pray for them, to be charitable and above all to spread the ideas of spiritualism! We know that her husband tried a session but seems very skeptical...In a communication one of the spirits evokes the Other world which is organized into planets hierarchized according to the degree of wisdom, the summit seems to be the planet Juno .

70-page manuscript, quite fascinating to read!

The book is continued by another hand (probably at the beginning of the 20th century) who used it to note famous quotes and thoughts (out of 114 pages, around twenty leaves were cut from this part) then 250 blank pages remain.

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