An attractive set of three little volumes, published between 1862 and 1884 and all numbered editions, containing the catalogues of three libraries of Marie Antoinette: that of her boudoir (1862), at the Petit Trianon (1863) and at the Tuileries (1884).
Interestingly they were compiled from primary and official records of the Queen’s libraries by three different scholars and bibliographers; the first by librarian and archivist Paul Lacour (1832-91); the second by Paul Lacroix, writer and curator at the Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal (1806-1884); and the last by ‘E.Q.B’, Ernest Quentin Bauchart (1830-1909), writer and bibliophile. They were not published as a set or series, and indeed Lacroix, author of the Trianon volume, presents his as a correction to Lacour’s study the year before, which he describes as limited, and based on only partial primary sources. The Trianon library, he writes, was part of Marie Antoinette’s ‘livres du boudoir’ library, and one of two that she had, the other being that at the Tuileries. ‘This last was the most considerable, in a word, the most royal’(p.xv).
As well as being an interesting account of Marie Antoinette’s reading and collection, all three writers in their introductions are sympathetic towards Marie Antoinette, painting her as something of a doomed young ingénue. They testify to the renewed interest in the Queen and the court of Louis XV in the second French Empire and the closing years of the nineteenth century, particularly driven by Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. “Eugénie followed Marie-Antoinette almost step for step. She lived in the same palaces, she preferred the Trianon, she even surrounded herself with furniture and objects which had belonged to the guillotined queen, so much so that the very ornate Louis XVI style came back into fashion, Eugénie organising an exhibition in Marie-Antoinette’s memory” (Huguenaud).
K. Huguenaud, ‘The Empress Eugénie in eighteenth-century costume’, Napoleon.org [open access].
