De Mesmes was a collector
with a love of curiosities of all kinds. He seems to have been equally
fond of his early specimens of printing, his Flemish and Italian
illuminations, and the Arabic and Armenian treatises procured by his
agents in the East. His library became a valuable museum which was
praised by all the writers of that age, except indeed by Francois Pithou,
who called De Mesmes a literary grave-digger, and mourned over the burial
of so many good books in those cold and gloomy sepulchres.
There seems to have been little occasion for this outburst, since the
library was open to all who could make a good use of it during the life
of Henri de Mesmes and under his son and grandson. Henri de Mesmes the
younger, its owner in the third generation, was renowned for his zeal in
collecting; he is said to have even procured MSS. from the Court of the
Great Mogul, dispatched by a French goldsmith at Delhi, who packed them
in red cotton and stuffed them into the hollow of a bamboo for safer
carriage. One of the finest things in his whole library was the Psalter
which Louis IX. had given to Guillaume de Mesmes: it had come by some
means into the library at Whitehall; but on the execution of Charles I.
the French Ambassador had been able to secure it, and had restored it to
the family of the original donee.
The Norman family of Bigot rivalled the race of De Mesmes in their ardour
for book-collecting. Jean Bigot in 1649 had a magnificent library of 6000
volumes, partly inherited from his ancestors, and partly collected out of
the monastic libraries at Fecamp and Mont St.
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