A lady collector who loved books not very well perhaps, but certainly not wisely, was the unhappy Marie Antoinette. The controversy in France about the private character of the Queen has been as acrimonious as the Scotch discussion about Mary Stuart. Evidence, good and bad, letters as apocryphal as the letters of the famous “casket,” have been produced on both sides. A few years ago, under the empire, M. Louis Lacour found a manuscript catalogue of the books in the Queen’s boudoir. They were all novels of the flimsiest sort,—“L’Amitié Dangereuse,” “Les Suites d’un Moment d’Erreur,” and even the stories of Louvet and of Rétif de la Bretonne. These volumes all bore the letters “C. T.” (Château de Trianon), and during the Revolution they were scattered among the various public libraries of Paris. The Queen’s more important library was at the Tuileries, but at Versailles she had only three books, as the commissioners of the Convention found, when they made an inventory of the property of la femme Capet. Among the three was the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” printed, with eighty exquisite designs by Cochin, at the expense of “Monsieur,” afterwards Louis XVIII. Books with the arms of Marie Antoinette are very rare in private collections; in sales they are as much sought after as those of Madame Du Barry.
With these illustrations of the kind of interest that belongs to books of old collectors, we may close this chapter. The reader has before him a list, with examples, of the kinds of books at present most in vogue among amateurs. He must judge for himself whether he will follow the fashion, by aid either of a long purse or of patient research, or whether he will find out new paths for himself. A scholar is rarely a rich man. He cannot compete with plutocrats who buy by deputy. But, if he pursues the works he really needs, he may make a valuable collection. He cannot go far wrong while he brings together the books that he finds most congenial to his own taste and most useful to his own studies. Here, then, in the words of the old “sentiment,” I bid him farewell, and wish “success to his inclinations, provided they are virtuous.” There is a set of collectors, alas! whose inclinations are not virtuous. The most famous of them, a Frenchman, observed that his own collection of bad books was unique. That of an English rival, he admitted, was respectable,—“mais milord se livre à des autres préoccupations!” He thought a collector’s whole heart should be with his treasures.
En bouquinant se trouve grand soulas.
Soubent m’en vay musant, à petis pas,
Au long des quais, pour flairer maint bieux livre.
Des Elzevier la Sphere me rend yure,
Et la Sirène aussi m’esmeut. Grand cas
Fais-je d’Estienne, Aide, ou Dolet. Mais Ias!
Le vieux Caxton ne se rencontre pas,
Plus qu’ agneau d’or parmi jetons de cuivre,
En bouquinant!
Pour tout plaisir que l’on goute icy-bas
La Grace a Dieu. Mieux vaut, sans altercas,
Chasser bouquin: Nul mal n’en peult s’ensuivre.
Dr sus au livre: il est le grand appas.
Clair est le ciel. Amis, qui veut me suivre
En bouquinant?
A. L.
CHAPTER IV.
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS [123]
“ . . . the pictures for the page atone,
And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own;”—