Here we have another typical Devéria portfolio on a military theme, Military Tactics, complete with a set of hand-lithographed captions which would have meant more to a nineteenth-century collector than to us. Those with sharp eyes will see that two of the prints in this portfolio are the same as ones included in Les petits jeux innocens; this is because a great deal of mixing and matching went on in the selling and collecting of mid-nineteenth-century erotic prints.

The truth is that there has never been a detailed catalogue of Devéria prints, especially of the erotic series. The closest we have is the 1887 catalogue of one ‘Prince Galitzin’, supposedly a Russian collector, which includes 958 separate items and a Supplement Iconographique, listing 203 suites of erotic illustrations, including many by Devéria. The fiction that this was the catalogue of the collection of a Russian prince was dispelled by Jacques Duprilot in 1989 in his privately-printed L’enigme du catalogue du cabinet secret du Prince G***, where he reveals that it was actually the catalogue of a Brussels bookseller named Lehec. The complete Galitzin volume, Catalogue du cabinet secret du Prince G***: collection de livres, objets curieux et rares concernant l’amour, les femmes et le mariage, was reprinted in facsimile by Charles Skilton in 1975.