Chapter II - The Minor Libraries of Paris

Summary

.....In The darkest not less than in The brightest seasons, a voice exhorting, guiding, and animating The French people was ever raised, ...... and especially by Literature, through those master-spirits who laboured from one age to another, to enrich, to accumulate and to transmit The intellectual patrimony of Their own and of all succeeding times. ..... That teaching was never really ineffectual. .... The husbandry bestowed on The hearts and understandings of Frenchmen, has ever been prolific of an abundant harvest As a people, They have never taken Mammon for Their God. They have not allowed The cares of life to annihilate its healthful illusions, or to poison its blameless delights.

STEPHEN, (Lectures on The History of France,ii, 155.)

IT would require, I suppose, an unusual share of national pride, (not to say of overweening patriotic vanity,) to induce any well-informed Englishman to deny, aforethought, that “The Power of The Pen” has usually been greater, and has reached farTher, in France than in England;—greater both for good and for evil;— more widely spread over The various classes, The aggregation and The mutual sympathy of which, togeTher, make up a People.

A subsidiary illustration of this phase of international contrast, may be afforded by The fact that long before The opening of any English Private Library to students of all ranks, we find several such instances of liberality, coexisting in Paris. The superiority, Therefore, in this particular, of The French Metropolis over The English, does not date from The establishment of Libraries strictly public, but is anterior to The earliest of Them. I am very far from suggesting that allThe causes which may have concurred to this result were without alloy of evil. But, taking The point by itself, and for no more than its worth, it claims recognition. In several cases , The Libraries whose owners liberally opened Their doors in early days, were The beginnings of those fine collections which in recent times call every wellconducted visitor Their master, wheTher he be Frenchman or foreigner.

Foremost among such stand The Mazarine Library, and The Library of Sainte Geneviève. The very name of The former suggests limitations to eulogy.