From kings and queens the fashion passed to the great lords, it having come to the kings and queens from a private individual. The Constable Anne de Montmorency adorned his bindings with a cross and spread eagle. Among the amateurs of binding of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries using distinctive marks, we may mention Philip Desportes, the poet, who used two [phi] enlaced, as did also Superintendent Fouquet in the seventeenth century. The brothers Dupuy adopted the double [delta], arranged as a star. Colbert had a curled snake (_coluber_ for Colbert!), the Gondis two masses of arms, Madame de Pompadour three towers, etc. Fouquet beside the [phi] used a squirrel on some of his bindings. [Illustration: Fig. 113.--Binding with the arms of Mansfeldt, with _azure_ scroll work, from the Didot collection.] In Germany, Count Mansfeldt adopted the ornamental style with arms, of which a specimen is here given; and Marc Laurin de Watervliet also decorated and dedicated his books to his friends, using the motto "Virtus in arduo." Among the lords of the French courts who favoured polychromatic ornament and bold compositions were the young Valois, Louis de Sainte Maure, Marquis of Nesle, and Henri de Guise, called "Le balafré." Charles IX. had his emblems and devices, the double "C" crowned the legend "Pietate et justitia," but his brother, Henri III., loved the decoration of books more than he did. The passion of the King for miniatures which he cut out of books is known; this passion for golden things he repeated on bindings, for which he chose special designs. Henri III. was an amateur of dances of death; he visited cemeteries, attended funerals, and took a death's-head for his emblem. This emblem was not his invention; long before him Marot had addressed an epigram to a lady in which he brought love and death into close conjunction. However that may be, the King chose skeletons and penitents' tears to ornament his books. He also tolerated diamonds, although he absolutely prohibited them in the clothing of ladies or fixed the number _pro rata_ with the rank of the authorised person. There was in this prince a singular mixture of taste and artistic acuteness by the side of a mania or hallucination which was reflected on the most intimate objects of his apparel or of his furniture. Thus if we find, at the end of the sixteenth century, a death's-head on the sides or the back of a volume, the binding is of the period of Henri III.