then not a long one. CHAPTER XIII Further details of the Public Library of Tours.—Marmoutier.—The Royal Abbey of Cormery.—Licence of Hadrian I to St. Martin’s to elect bishops.—Details of the Chapter of the Cathedral Church of Tours. The Public Library of Tours, as we have seen, has a very large and interesting collection of manuscripts, which have come mainly from three sources, the libraries, namely, of (1) the Cathedral church of Tours, (2) the Monastery known as Marmoutier, and (3) the Collegiate church of St. Martin. Twenty-one other churches and foundations in the neighbourhood contributed manuscripts, besides such collections as the expelled nobles possessed. In 1791 the libraries of the old churches were collected into one depot, the French Church having been organized as a civil institution in that year and monastic vows made illegal. In 1793 the Conseil Général of the Indre-et-Loire ordered that “les livres et manuscrits provenant des maisons religieuses et des émigrés seront placés au ci-devant Évêché, à l’effet de quoi le citoyen Suzor sera averti de l’évacuer au plus tard le 15 mars prochain”. The third floor of the Évêché was used for housing the manuscripts, &c., and by a most fortunate appointment a true lover of the old things was made librarian. This was Dom Jean Joseph Abrassart, ex-religious of Marmoutier. He succeeded in saving a very large proportion of the ancient manuscripts known to be in existence in the neighbourhood, especially those at Marmoutier. The library of the Cathedral church at Tours dated from the time of St. Perpetuus, the sixth bishop, who left to his Cathedral church all his manuscripts except the copy of the Gospels written by the hand of St. Hilary of Poitiers (353-68) whom St. Martin had visited.[206] Perpetuus was Bishop of Tours from 460 to 494. Ruinart, whose edition of Gregory of Tours Migne took as the original of his edition, notes that he had seen in the Cathedral library at Tours a book in Saxon characters which had been supposed to be the work of Hilary’s own hand; but he found that it contained matter much later than Hilary’s time, and that the author had appended an inscription stating himself to be Holaindus by name. A catalogue of the Cathedral library was made in 1706 by the Chanoine Victor d’Avanne, at which time the library contained 461 manuscripts. The Chanoine complained that many other manuscripts had been borrowed by savants and not returned; he names as culprits Auguste de Thou, André Duchesne, Maan, and Michel de Marolls. Of the 461 manuscripts catalogued, the Public Library now has 309.