pride that, though Madame Pompadour had possessed a larger library,
that of Madame Du Barry was the better selected. Thanks to her new
collection, the lady learned to read with fluency, but she never
overcame the difficulties of spelling.

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'Amitie Dangereuse," "Les Suites d'un Moment
d'Erreur," and even the stories of Louvet and of Retif de la
Bretonne. These volumes all bore the letters "C. T." (Chateau 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