Marie Antoinette – Let Her Read Books!

1915

Marie Antoinette's Books.

The unhappy Queen Marie Antoinette possessed an important library of 4,712 volumes, consisting of plays and romances, little books a la mode, the works of Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Bourdaloue, Massillon, Boileau, Cousseau, Corneille, Moliere, Voltaire and many others. Sbe loved music passionately and had a large collection of operas in eighty-nine numbers. The bindings were by Blaizot and were uniform in red morocco, with the arms of France and Austria stamped upon them. The execution of the work was poor and the decadence in the art of binding evident. The glories of the art of Padeloup and the Deromes had passed away, and the revolution effectually killed whatever knowledge remained of the ancient skill of the bookbinders. Half a century later saw its revival in France, and the art has since fiourished both there and on English soil.—London Spectator.


Daniel O'Connell.

After a dinner at Lord Dungarvan's, Lady Morgan writes in her diary, I met the redoubtable Dan O'Connell. Dan is not brilliant in private life, not even agreeable. He is mild, silent, unassuming, apparently absorbed and an utter stranger to the give and take charm of good society. I said so to Lord Clanricarde, who replied: "If you knew how I found him this morning: His hall, the very steps of his door, crowded with his clientele. He had a word or a written order for each, then hurried off to the law courts, thence to the Improvement society and was the guest here today. Two hours before he was making that clever but violent speech to Mr. la Touche. and now no wonder that he looks like an extinct volcano."

The Charm of A Great Biography

1916

It Leads the Reader Into Quaint and Delightful Byways

Reading biography will furnish you with a peculiar and rare form of entertainment, for besides the subject at hand biography legitimately treats of the foibles, the fashions and the peculiarities of the age with which it deals, says Youth's Companion.

History, although it may have its lighter moments, is essentially sober, but biography, although it is never merely farcical or satirical, may touch vividly open the lighter phases of life and take you, as it were, into quaint and delightful byways, through private parks and into remote and lovely fields.

"Indeed," wrote Boswell in his introduction to his famous biography, "I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man's life than by not only relating the most important events of it in their order, but by interweaving what he privately wrote and said and thought, by which mankind are enabled, as it were, to see him live and to live o'er each scene with him as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life."

Biography, treated in that manner, must inevitably include much that is delightfully diverting. It will give you "the table talk of the great;" it will recount those fascinating little incidents and anecdotes that history so often regards as beneath its notice. It will afford far more than a running account of a life, "beginning with a pedigree and ending with a funeral."