A fine French spyglass

Lerebours is generally considered the pre-eminent French optical instrument maker of the early 19th century; as Daumas notes, he was part of a small group who 'succeeded during the first twenty years of the [19th] century, in raising the French optical industry to a level equal to that of England' (M. Daumas Scientific Instruments of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and their Makers (London: 1972), p. 284). Following his appointment as certified engineer to the king in 1789, he became optician to the Navy and the Bureau des Longitudes after 1800, and was purveyor of instruments to Napoleon in 1804, when he was created Emperor, dating this instrument to the first quarter of the 19th century.