La petite rapporteuse.*...*The telltale

Londres [i.e. London]: Chez William Darton, [s.d., c.1825] 36pp. With a folding engraved frontispiece, and two further engraved plates. Original publisher's printed stiff buff wrappers. A trifle rubbed, marked, and dusty. Frontispiece a little creased, very occasional spotting. The first edition in French of prolific Darton author Mary Elliott's (née Belson) (c.1794-1870) The Tell-tale, in which a young girl, Martha, who always gossips about the faults of others, is shunned by her school- mates. She mends her ways only when she nearly brings a poor boy to disaster after she accuses him of being a thief, when in actuality he has merely misplaced a shilling with which he had been entrusted. As with many of Elliot's tales, the book is designed to show how a trivial incident in a child's life may have far more important, or indeed catastrophic, implications then it would initially appear. OCLC records copies at seven locations (BL, California, Harvard, Miami, Oxford, Toronto, and V&A); COPAC adds no further. Darton H486 (1), Moon, The children's books of Mary (Belson) Elliot, 447.. First edition in French. 12mo.