HUGO Victor (1802-1885). Recueil de l'Académie des jeux floraux (Toulouse, M.-J. Dalles; 4 issues: 1818-1819, 1820 and 1821); bound in 3 vols. in-8, glazed blond calf, on the boards framed with gilt filets à la Duseuil, smooth spines decorated with grotesque, inner border with gilt filets (period binding). Reunion of the rare issues in which appeared the first verses of Victor Hugo ever published. Perhaps the copy of Victor Hugo. Volume I: years 1818-1819, containing La Mort duc d'Enghien by Eugène Hugo (1818); and in 1819, the Ode sur le rétablissement de la statue d'Henri IV, Les Vierges de Verdun and Les Derniers Bardes. Volume II: 1820, containing Moïse sur le Nil, Le Jeune Banni and Les Deux Âges. Volume III: 1821, containing Quiberon. Hugo included these poems in his Odes et Poésies diverses (1822), his first collection of verse. This may have been Victor Hugo's personal copy, according to the great bibliophile René Descamps-Scrive, who wrote this note in pencil on the back of the first volume's flyleaf: "This copy is probably Victor Hugo's. See the copy of the Nouvelles odes funambulesques in a similar binding with a letter from the author to the master". Provenance: Victor Hugo (?), René Descamps-Scrive (bookplate).