In 1791 Monsieur J. B. Michaud cried aloud on his book-plate for “_La Liberté ou la Mort_” and many others adopted the phrase, at a time when Death was certainly more _en évidence_ than Liberty. Poor Léon Gambetta, probably the most daring and original of modern French politicians, had his book-plate inscribed “_Vouloir c’est Pouvoir_,” an axiom which he, the son of a poor provincial grocer, had proved correct up to a certain point. [Illustration: BOOK-PLATE OF FR. SERRIER.] There is no article in the “Dictionnaire des Girouettes” more laughable than that devoted to Monsieur Nicholas François de Neufchateau, who, not content with being a political turncoat of the first order, celebrated each of his changes of faith by songs in honour of his new ideal of government. These poems, here side by side in the dictionary, proclaim the man at once a venal weathercock and a conceited prig. [Illustration: BOOK-PLATE OF JACQUES FLACH.] He was born in 1752; before the outbreak of the Revolution he was a lawyer in Paris; afterwards he became President of the National Assembly, when he called King Louis XVI. a traitor, yet this did not prevent his being sent to prison by Barrère in 1793. On his release he wrote a poem in honour of Barrère; later on he joined with the senate in advising Napoleon to create himself emperor. The emperor could do no less in return than create Neufchateau a Count of the Empire. What became of him on the Restoration does not appear, except that in 1815 he obtained permission to dedicate a volume of his fables to the king. To the end of time the ex-libris of Monsieur N. François de Neufchateau will not only pompously proclaim all the titles given to him by Napoleon I., but describe in verse the blazon of his arms, in which, as he says, the useful and the ornamental are curiously blended, the whole being surmounted by one of David’s _toques_, with the five waving ostrich feathers denoting senatorial rank. Yet this was the man who had previously written: “Ces rubans, ces cordons, et ces chaines dorées: Des esclaves des rois ces pompeuses livrées, Ne sont que des hochets dont la vaine splendeur Deguise le néant d’une folle grandeur.” M. de Neufchateau was a busy man and a versatile, writing on politics, social economy, history, and agriculture in turns, but it is as a _poet_ that he will be known to posterity through his book-plate, which collectors will ever prize as a monument of egregious vanity. M. François de Neufchateau died in 1828. There is a chapter in “Ex-Libris Ana” (Paris, L. Joly) devoted to manuscript inscriptions of ownership in books; one is given, as having been commonly written in his books, by an author named Collé: “A Collé ce livre apartint Auparavant qu’il te parvint.” [Illustration: BOOK-PLATE OF N. FRANÇOIS DE NEUFCHATEAU.