Philippe PINEL (1745-1826). Autograph manuscript; 2 pages in-fol. Very rare and curious manuscript by the famous physician and forerunner of psychiatry, on the youth of Louis XI. This is probably the beginning of a historical study focusing on the education and character of the future Louis XI, then Dauphin... "One of the means of breaking his budding pride and softening his indomitable character would undoubtedly have been, as Xenophon proposes in the Ciropedie, an institution shared with other children of the same age, i.e. the happy art of correcting perverse inclinations not by threats that embitter, but by living examples of a holy respect for the laws, of a severe temperance and of all the virtues which elevate the soul, a lively emulation inflamed not by sterile precepts, but by a continual competition of generous actions, distinctions and rewards [....] A somber taciturnity, a hard and repulsive gravity, the apres inégalités of a character full of caprices and emportemens, the search for isolation and solitude, an oblique look with the timid embarrassment of an artificial soul, a shady defiance as if candor and good faith had been exiled from the earth, betray early on the melancholic temperament of Louis Dauphin and offer threatening presages"... Etc.