It seems probable that the attention which Vérard paid to his vellum editions, in which the woodcuts were only useful as guides to the illustrator, made him less careful than he would otherwise have been to secure the best possible work in his ordinary books. Certainly I think his most interesting cuts
are to be found not in his later books but in the collection of six treatises which he had printed by Gillet Cousteau and Jehan Menard in 1492, and republished, somewhat less sumptuously, the next year, under the collective title L'art de bien vivre et de bien mourir, the reprint coming from the press of Pierre Le Rouge. The cuts in this collection have a special interest for us, because some of them were afterwards used in English books, and we may therefore be allowed to examine them at some length.
In the 1492 edition the first title-page Le liure intitule lart de bien mourir heralds only the first work, an adaptation of the old Ars Moriendi showing the struggle between good and bad angels for the possession of the dying soul. The devils tempt the sufferer to hasten his end ('interficias teipsum' one of them is saying, the words being printed on a label), they remind him of his sins ('periuratus es'), tempt him to worldly thoughts ('intende thesauro'), persuade his physicians to over-commiseration ('Ecce quantam penam patitur'), or flatter him with undeserved praise ('coronam meruisti'). To each of these assaults his good angels have a 'bonne inspiracion' by way of answer, and the devils have to confess 'spes nobis nulla' and to see the little figure of the soul received into heaven. The second treatise is called at the beginning L'eguyllon de crainte divine pour bien mourir, but on the title-page placed on the back of the last leaf 'les paines
denfer et les paines de purgatoire.' Its illustrations consist of large cuts in which devils are inflicting excruciating and revolting tortures on their victims. Its colophon gives the printers' names and the date July 18, 1492. The next three parts of the book are Le Traité de l'avenement de l'Antechrist, Les Quinze Signes, or Fifteen Tokens of Judgment, and Les Joies du Paradis. The printing of these was finished on October 28. Only the middle treatise is much illustrated, but here the artist had full play for his powers in representing the fish swimming on the hills, the seas falling into the abyss, the sea-monsters covering the earth, the flames of the sea, the trees wet with blood, the crumbling of cities, the stones fighting among themselves, and the other
signs of the Last Day. Perhaps the best of this set of cuts is that representing the 'esbahissement' or astonishment of the men and women who had hidden themselves in holes in the earth, when at last they ventured forth. But in the last treatise, the Art de bien vivre, quaintness and horror are replaced by really beautiful work. The cuts here are intended to illustrate the Ave Maria, Lord's Prayer, Creed, Ten Commandments, and Seven Sacraments. Those in the last series are the largest in the book, each of them occupying a full page. The Creed has a series of smaller cuts of inferior work. But the picture which precedes this, representing the twelve apostles, and the pictures of the Angelic Salutation, of the Pope invoking the Blessed Virgin (here shown), and of Christ teaching the Apostles, show the finest work, outside the Horae, in any French books during the fifteenth century. These blocks appear also in two English books printed at Paris, in 1503, The Traytte of god lyuyng and good deyng, and The Kalendayr of Shyppars, and in many of the English editions of the latter work from Pynson's in 1506 onward.
Pierre Lerouge, one of Vérard's printers, produced at least one fine book quite independently of him. This is the first illustrated edition of La Mer des Hystoires, the French version of the Rudimentum Noviciorum (see p. 50), the general plan of which it follows, though not slavishly. Pierre Lerouge printed his edition for a publisher named Vincent