Thanks to the administration of Colbert and the liberalities of the King, the collection had been augmented threefold. At the time of the removal to the Rue Vivienne, Nicolas Clément worked at the classifying and cataloguing of 35,000 volumes. He distributed them into methodical classes, and devoted nine years--1675 to 1684--to his work. But this first unravelling was soon insufficient. Less than four years after, he commenced a new inventory in twenty-one volumes, which occupied thirty years, having been finished in the course of March, 1714. This time the numbers amounted to 43,000 printed volumes; his twenty-three principal divisions, containing all the letters of the alphabet, are very nearly preserved up to our day. In 1697 the question of publishing this enormous work was agitated, and on this point Clément had a curious correspondence with a learned Dane named Frederick Bostgaard; he also, in a celebrated pamphlet, _Idée d'une Nouvelle Manière de dresser le Catalogue d'une Bibliothèque_, indicated practical observations; he resolved this arduous question for important collections by difference of sizes; but his project was not executed, although favoured from the first by Abbé Bignon. As the collection was not available for workers, the work of Clément had only a relative importance. A councillor of the Prince of Waldeck, a German of the name of Nemeitz, who travelled in France in the beginning of the eighteenth century, having seen it in the houses of the Rue Vivienne, says that the library occupied then twenty-six rooms and contained 75,000 volumes in all; it was shown voluntarily to strangers, but not to the public. Nemeitz gives some other curious particulars as to the libraries of Paris (_Séjour à Paris:_ Leyde, 1727, 8vo). The bank of Law, that had been lodged for some time in the Hotel de Nevers, alienated by the heirs of Mazarin, soon disappeared with the ruin of his system. As we have said above, Bignon appreciated the importance of the neglected palace for commodiously lodging the royal collections. This was in 1721. The collection was about to be subdivided into four sections, or, as they were then called in the administrative style, four distinct departments: manuscripts, printed books, titles, and engraved plates. The master of the library pressed the Regent to profit by the occasion, to which he agreed. In the month of September the removal commenced, and from the Rue Vivienne, the royal library, the first in the world and the most valuable, as Naudé says, entered the former palace of the Cardinal, which it was never to quit again.