8vo. (Some marginal browning.) Contemporary half cloth, with original printed front wrapper bound in; cloth slipcase. Provenance: Felix Potin Collection bookplate laid-in. 

 

THE MARQUIS DE MORÈS’S COPY, SIGNED (“Mores”) on front wrapper in pencil, and with his annotations in pencil throughout. 

 

Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès et de Montemaggiore, commonly known as the Marquis de Morès, was a French duelist, frontier ranchman in the Badlands of Dakota Territory during the final years of the American Old West era, a railroad pioneer in Vietnam, and a politician in his native France. He resigned from the French cavalry in 1882 and married Medora von Hoffman, sometimes called the Marquise. Soon thereafter, he would move to the North Dakota badlands to begin ranching, purchasing 44,500 acres for that purpose. He also opened a stagecoach business. He tried to revolutionize the ranching industry by shipping refrigerated meat to Chicago by railroad, thus bypassing the Chicago stockyards. He built a meat-packing plant for this purpose in Medora, the town he founded in 1883 and named for his wife. He became famous in the West as a rancher and gunslinger, getting arrested for murder a few times, but was always acquitted. Known as an adventurer, he was quick to anger and was engaged in numerous duels throughout his life; he notoriously sent Theodore Roosevelt what the latter interpreted as a challenge to a duel. Following his business failure, he left Dakota Territory and returned to France. He was commissioned by the French army to build a proposed railroad in Vietnam, from the Chinese frontier to the Gulf of Tonkin, and arrived in Asia to lead railroad construction in the fall of 1888. Later, the Marquis went on an expedition to Africa. He had gotten involved in political disputes and made some bitter enemies. While he was in Africa, he was murdered. With a Felix Potin celebrity trade card depicting the Marquis de Morès laid in. ACCORDING TO  ONLINE RECORDS, WE FIND NO MATERIAL SIGNED BY THE MARQUIS DE MORÈS.