The image and text shown above comes from the online catalogues of LIBRARIE SOURGET. Found In catalogue number 24, page 78, lot 30. We see here the armes de Marie-Antoinette, and suspect that this binding may have also been executed by François Gaudreau. In the first pages of this catalogue we find a photograph of a bookshelf showing the various books being auctioned, here we find the spines of lot 30. In Comparative Diagram 1. I show these spines compared with the spines from the Bruyere binding shown on page 5. Unfortunately the picture qualtity of the Sourgate pdf file is not great but, we can still see that there are a number oftools that appear to be the same. I have scoured the internet for photographs of bindings that have been decorated with the arms of Marie-Antoinette, there are a good number but the armes differ greatly, and photos of the bindings showing the spines clearly are rare.
I should define this situation clearly, we need to find bindings with the arms of Marie-Antoinette that we can clearly identify as the work of Guadreau, finding others will then be a much easier task, as we only need to look as far as the armes, assuming of course that Gaudreau continued to use the same stamp, as it appears he has done with the bindings of the comtesse d'Artess and comtesse de Provence. Here then we are forced to use the Sourget example, even though it is not a high quality image, it is a start. After a long search I am beginning to to suspect that such bindings are very rare, certainly there are none in the Bibliotheque nationale de France, none in their catalogues at any rate.
There are some important facts that need to be remembered in the examination of these armes. Marie-Antoinette "became Dauphine of France in May 1770 at age 14 upon her marriage to Louis-Auguste, heir apparent to the French throne. On the 10th of May 1774, her husband ascended the throne as Louis XVI and she assumed the title Queen of France and Navarre". This means that these armes could not appear before May 1774, before this the arms would have contained the dauphin insignias.
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