They wear their beards in beard-cases, according to the custom of their time and country, and it was these beard-cases that La Fontaine took for bibs. The gallery of Saint-Mandé, which contained these two monuments that we have followed so far afield, was magnificently decorated with thirteen ancient gods in marble, life-size, and thirty-three busts in bronze or marble, placed on pedestals. Among these busts were those of Socrates and Seneca. Imagine these faces, brown or luminous, ranged about the chamber, where the books displayed the sombre resplendence of their brown and gilt backs. Imagine the pictures, the cabinets of medals, the tables of porphyry, the mosaics; imagine a thousand precious curiosities, and you will have some idea of this gallery, the rich treasures of which were to be dispersed almost as soon as they had been collected. The Superintendent had little time for reading, but he loved to turn over the pages of his books, for he was a well-read man. He promised himself the pleasures of learned, leisurely study in his old age, when he would no longer read a welcome in ladies' eyes. Meanwhile, he had had twenty-seven thousand volumes arranged on the shelves of his gallery, around those two sarcophagi the story of which had carried us so far afield from Saint-Mandé and the last days of Mazarin. These twenty-seven thousand volumes comprised seven thousand in folio, twelve thousand in quarto and eight thousand in octavo. They were not all in the gallery. There was, in particular, a room for the "Alcorans, the Talmuds and some old Bible commentaries."[39] The rich collection of printed books which he had gathered together embraced universal history, medicine, law, natural history, mathematics, oratory, theology and philosophy, as well as the fine arts, represented by illustrated volumes. These books, of which it would not be possible to compile a catalogue to-day, were not, it would seem, contained in beautiful morocco bindings, finely gilt and richly adorned with coats of arms, like those which honoured Mazarin's library. The financier had bought hastily, in a wholesale fashion, books already bound, so that we cannot rank him among the great bibliophiles, although he may be numbered among the lovers of books. That Foucquet loved books, as he loved gardens, as he loved everything flattering to the taste of a well-bred man, that he even preferred books to anything else, there is no doubt, for we have irrefutable testimony of the fact. In the _Conseils de la Sagesse,_ which he wrote in prison, may be found this beautiful phrase: "You know that formerly I used to find convention in my books."[40]