The Cardinal arrested
them both, and dragged them along the Rhone in a boat attached to his own
barge; and De Thou was executed as a scapegoat, while most of the leaders
saved their lives. The Cardinal died soon afterwards, without having
confiscated the library; and it passed to Jacques-Auguste, the
historian's younger son, who by a tardy act of grace had been restored
to the civil rights enjoyed by his brother before his unjust conviction.
He was by all accounts as great a book-collector as his father; and he
had the good fortune to marry an heiress, Marie Picardet, who brought
with her a large quantity of books from her father's house in Britanny.
In the year 1677 the 'Bibliotheca Thuana' with all its additions passed
to the Abbe Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who was soon afterwards compelled to
part with it to the President Charron de Menars. St. Simon praised its
new owner as a most worthy and honourable nonentity; but he had the sense
to step into the breach and to save the 'Thuana' from destruction. When
he sold the library to the Cardinal de Rohan, in 1706, he reserved the
_Collection Du Puy_ for his daughters. It is believed that the Cardinal,
through the cleverness of his secretary Oliva, obtained the historian's
choice examples for less than the price of the binding. We must follow
the career of the collection to its melancholy end. The Cardinal left it
to his nephew the Prince de Soubise. The world knows him as the inventor
of a sauce and as the general in one lost battle; but he had a higher
fame among the booksellers for his prowess in the auction-room.
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