The position of Cramoisy made it natural for Cardinal de Richelieu to fix his eyes on him for the direction of the Royal Printing House. This establishment, founded by the King in 1640, was installed within the Louvre, in a long series of rooms which formed a workshop without rival in the world. Sublet des Noyers was named superintendent, Trichet du Fresne corrector; and under this triple direction the presses commenced to work. The first book was the _Imitation de Jésus-Christ_, dated 1640, folio, a fine book enough, but not to be compared to the Elzevir editions. The types used in this book are attributed to Claude Garamond, founder of the sixteenth century, to whom are due the Greek types of Francis I. With the Royal Printing House, as often happens with State enterprises, the cost was great, and the return nothing. Only a few years after its foundation it had swallowed up nearly 400,000 livres, a very heavy sum for a badly balanced treasury; it had produced sixty or seventy volumes of moderate value; and after Cramoisy the management was so little in earnest that it turned the workshops into a stable, called "the little stable of the King," at the commencement of the eighteenth century. [Illustration: Fig. 74.--Plate taken from the _Lumière du Cloistre_. Copper plate by Callot.] To return to the artists of the Book under Louis XIII. and Cardinal Richelieu, we must go back a little, before the foundation of the Royal Printing House, and we shall find the French school of illustration at a time when Callot was giving it a vigorous lift and trying to do away with its affected and hard style. It must be acknowledged that Callot was not a vignettist, a special designer; his art aimed higher, and ordinarily succeeded better; yet he did not disdain frontispieces, and made them for the _Coustumier de Lorraine_, the _Harpalice_ of Bracciolini, and for a crowd of others of which the enumeration would be tedious. Certain of his works passed into Italy, where they raised a little the debased level of the Book. Then he adorned several works with etchings, among them the _Lumière du Cloistre_, published by Francis Langlois 1646. It was one of the symbolic and sententious works with which the public taste is never satiated, and a kind of guide for the priest. At the bottom of the little etching here given, representing birds falling from a tree, we read,-- "Ses petits hors du nid le courbeau jette en bas, Lorsque par leur blancheur ils lui sont dissemblables. Le bon prélat de mesme au cloistre n'admet pas Ceux qui n'ont rien d'esgal à ses moeurs vénérables."