Des Livres de M. Dubut is the title of the pretentious book-plate of the Curé de Viroflay, signed Le Roy, and dated 1782.
Here we have the arms of this pious son of the Church going straight to Paradise on a thunder-cloud, under the protection of two rather mundane-looking ladies. The world, the flesh, and—but no—the cross of St. Louis in the background prevents the completion of the trio. (See page 181.)
In a somewhat similar style of thunder-cloud decoration is the dated plate of the Abbé de Gricourt, already referred to.
The plates of J. A. Le Mercier show that at first over his arms he bore the coronet of a count, but that later on, probably during the revolutionary period, he had that erased to make way for a meaningless finial ornament, on the lower half of which the back part of the coronet can still be seen.
A modern addition to the French literature on book-plates is a sixteen-page pamphlet, entitled, Les Ex-Libris Oratoriens, published in 1892 by Charles Poussielgue, in the Rue Cassette, Paris.
This is a brief sketch of some ecclesiastical ex-libris, written by a priest, the Rev. Father Ingold, of L’Hay, near Paris. The pamphlet contains some facsimile illustrations, of which three are reproductions of exquisite plates designed by M. Claude Thièry, of Nancy. These are the plates of the library of the Oratory of Tours, of the library of the Massillon School, and lastly that of the author, Father Ingold, said to be copied from an original miniature, dated 1466. The Ingold family was of Alsatian origin, and the plate is essentially German in its design, the helmet being surmounted by the characteristic proboscis.
This artist, Claude Thièry, who died in 1895, excelled in small delicate hand-work, full of minute detail, in the manner of Callot; his own ex-libris is an admirable specimen of his style. A facsimile of it is given as a frontispiece to Henri Bouchot’s Les Ex-Libris. It represents a fifteenth-century student at work amongst his books, with the inscription: “Cestuy livre est à moy Claude Thiery, ymaigier du moult hault et puissant seigneur Monseigneur François Joseph Empéreur.”