User:MarieAntoinette
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[edit] Why Marie-Antoinette?
Tim started the ball rolling in the euphoria following the completion of Jefferson's library, partly in response to the objection that there weren't any women in the "Dead people's libraries" project. See this talk topic.
Marie-Antoinette's library is an interesting project for a number of reasons. She's a DWEF rather than a DWAM, the library has a manageable size (736 works), and there's a catalogue available on-line without any copyright difficulties. But maybe the most interesting thing about the library is that, like the great majority of living people's libraries here on LibraryThing, it's a library designed for reading pleasure. There are no heavy treatises on philosophy or theology, no law books, just piles of novels and plays, with a sprinkling of reference books and history.
Victorians like Louis Lacour may have felt obliged to criticise the Queen's advisers for the frivolity of the books they supplied her, but most of us would be more inclined to applaud, and to hope that she got plenty of opportunities to escape from formal court life and curl up with a trivial novel, or get together with a few friends to perform a play for their own amusement.
[edit] Background information on Marie-Antoinette's library
[edit] The Lacroix catalogue
The catalogue we have used is by Paul Lacroix, Curator of the Bibliothéque de l'Arsenal, published in 1863. Lacroix lists the books in the library of the Petit Trianon palace, according to the inventory made by the officials of the Convention in 1793, when the property of la femme Capet was confiscated by the revolutionary state. In a second part of the catalogue (pp.105ff.), Lacroix lists the books missing from the library at the time of the inventory, mostly the books kept in the Queen's boudoir (a catalogue of these had been published the previous year by Louis Lacour).
For many of the novels in the catalogue, Lacroix adds notes by the Marquis de Paulmy. De Paulmy was a diplomat and statesman as well as a great bibliophile and expert on trashy novels. His private library formed the nucleus of the Bibliothéque de l'Arsenal curated by Lacroix. De Paulmy's notes, signed "D.P." have been added as "reviews" here. Some are straightforward, merciless criticisms, some add details about the author's life, and some are rather personal: "Madame de Beaumont est jolie femme et écrit bien." De Paulmy's own forty-volume selection of novels, the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, is one of the works in the Queen's library (catalogued under "collections de romans").
[edit] Other resources for contemporary literature
- Catalogue de la Bibliothèque du Château d'Oron - searchable catalogue, contains a lot of contemporaryworks also in M-A's library
- wWriters (Women Writers database) - contains a lot of references to women novelists of the period and their works.
- Harold Wade Streeter, The Eighteenth Century English Novel in French Translation (Blom, 1970) - Google books - bibliography of novels translated into French from English.
- Members of the Académie française (short bios)
- Deux cent cinquantes pieçes ... - A collection of 250 French plays of the period, available for reading in Google Books
[edit] Technical/bibliographic issues
The LT library catalogue sources we found most useful for this project:
- SUDOC
- Oxford University (Bodleian)*
- British Library
- Library of Congress
- Royal Library of Sweden
- Koninglijke Bibliotheek
(*)It's surprising just how many of the more risqué novels are in the Bod. but not in SUDOC...
Where we could not find the right edition in one of these, we took the nearest edition we could find and used the tag "wrong edition" and put the details from Lacroix in the Comment field. Where we couldn't find the work at all in a library source, we had to resort to manual entry.
[edit] Author attribution
Most eighteenth century French novels were published anonymously, or under noms-de-plume, and many falsely claim to have been printed somewhere outside France. Obviously, being an author was a risky business.
Bibliographically, the correct thing to do is presumably to reproduce what is on the title page of the book exactly: for the purposes of LibraryThing, it is more interesting if there is an author, so that the book can eventually be combined with later editions.
We've filled the author in for anonymous books wherever an attribution could be made with reasonable confidence, typically when one or more of the following are true:
- the book is famous and the attribution is well-known
- a reputable library catalogue (SUDOC, LoC, Bodleian, etc.) returns the author name
- convincing internet sources attribute an author
- Lacroix or Paulmy mention an author (experience shows that they aren't always 100% reliable, so there should be a note if we take their attribution without confirmation)
In most cases, we've added a comment to explain this.
[edit] Author names
Where do you put the comma in something like Anne Claude Philippe de Pestels de Lévis de Tubières-Grimoard, comte de Caylus?
We've tried to be consistent, but catalogues tend to return names in different forms, and names were not necessarily stable at the time. There are problems with accented characters, variant spellings (Rétif/Restif de la Bretonne), titles versus family names, straightforward typos in Lacroix, and much else besides.
[edit] Plays
Plays are usually quite short, and therefore tend to be kept in libraries mostly in collected editions. Because Marie-Antoinette was keen on amateur theatricals, this library has an exceptional number of individually bound copies of separate plays.
The individual plays in the catalogue often don't have any publication data - (i.e. they are labelled sans titre in the catalogue). They are presumably performing copies bound specially for the Queen's library. We've used whatever pre-1789 edition we could find and used the tag "sans titre".
[edit] Tags
We've used the hierarchy of subject-headings in the Lacroix catalogue to tag works as we enter them. In a few cases we've shortened the headings slightly to avoid repetition. We haven't done any additional tagging, apart from administrative things like Wrong edition. Because the headings in Lacroix are hierarchical, there are places where a second tag might have been useful (e.g. Voyages de Gulliver is tagged Belles-lettres, Voyages imaginaires but not Romans anglais).
The second part of the collection is headed Liste des livres absents, égarés ou volés lors de l'inventaire de la bibliothèque en 1793 in Lacroix. This corresponds essentially to the boudoir collection, which was not found by the commissioners. These books are tagged boudoir
The system of headings used in the second part of the catalogue isn't quite consistent with that in the first. In particular:
- The general heading "Belles-lettres" is only used in the first part of the catalogue.
- Lacroix uses the heading "facéties et satires" in the first part of the catalogue and "satires et facéties" in the second - for consistency we used "satires et facéties" for both.
- In the second part, novels are simply divided into French and foreign; in the first part there are further subdivisions by genre and country.