Description de l'Univers was originally published in 1683 in Paris. These plates were drawn by the author himself and are from a slightly later German edition. Mallet's book is a multi-volume compilation of astronomical, geographical, and socio-cultural knowledge, and is remarkable in its use of genre scenes to complement the scientific information diagramed at the top of the page.

The illustration of the Sun is particularly spectacular and unusual as typically the Sun is represented with a human face. Here the Sun has a fiery world inside it, surrounded by puffs of smoke presumably erupting from solar volcanoes. This is consistent with Anathasius Kircher's (1602-1680) theories of sunspots as resulting from smoke rising off the surface of the Sun.