The Queen, The Wife, and the Mistress

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The binding at left for Marie-Thérèse, the first wife of Louis XIV, features a grid (semis) of fleurs-de-lis and her crowned MT cypher. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, binding decoration changed to focus on framing patterns with a centerpiece or armorial, as seen in the middle binding for Louis’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon. As an untitled queen of France, she was not permitted to use the French insignia as Marie-Thérèse did; however, this allowed Maintenon’s armorial to stand alone, undefined by that of her husband. Similarly, Louis’s mistress Madame de Montespan could not use the French royal emblems, and her binding at right includes only her initials.

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Bound for Queen Marie-Thérèse (1638–1683)
Red morocco, with semis gilt tooling and armorial, on: Office de la semaine sainte, 1659
Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan by 1906; PML 1884

Bound for Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719)
Augustin Du Seuil (1673–1746), binder
Red morocco, with gilt armorial, on: Guillaume Dardenne (act. 1737)
Description du plan en relief de l’Abbaye de la Trappe, 1708; PML 198439