Remember our record in the past and trust us a little in the present. In blind reverence we saved books and inaugurated Christian art. Historians suddenly began to demand documents and they grow more and more insistent on that point. Well, we can come to their aid and they can come to ours; many a pretty bargain has been struck in the exchange. Along with its old books and letters we have especially preserved the gentler, though none too gentle, side of the past. We can introduce you to men of other days in their libraries: a very good place to study them sympathetically. Among other charming facts, we can assure you that even during the confusion of a period of infinite intrigue complicated by religious wars and the Fronde, Richelieu and Mazarin found time to play at bibliomania, and perhaps we can persuade you that of all their games it was the most profitable. The executive Mazarin got hold of an invaluable expert, Naudé, who brought him bargains by the yard. What fun they must have had out of it,—Naudé literally taking a measuring-stick with him when he went “book-hunting,” and “the stalls where he had passed were like the towns through which Attila or the Tartars had swept!” But the result was different. Deserving books were sumptuously decked out in red and olive morocco with gold-tooled cardinal hats thereon, and took their rightful place in Mazarin’s palace, that Earthly Paradise of the bibliophile graced by beautiful books and gentle readers, for Mazarin’s library was cordially free, the first really free library in France. It is true that Saint Louis, always open to a beautiful idea, hearing of a sultan who had had copies made of the manuscripts of his realm for the benefit of the savants, endeavored to follow the example of the Moslem. Accordingly he made a beautiful collection of copies which were kept in the royal chapel—hardly a convenient place for the reading public; but then there was no reading public. However humble a Christian, however gentle a knight Saint Louis may have been, he was destitute of one instinct of the democrat. After his death his collection was broken up, but his idea descended to Charles the Wise, who practically started the Royal Library which, joined to the Mazarin, developed into the present Bibliotheque Nationale. As the oldest branch of the Public Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale occupies the ancestral home, the Palais Mazarin at Paris, where Mazarin’s motto, “Time and I,” rings forth in the majesty of accomplishment.