Bound For Louis Charles de la Baig, Comte de Viella (1744–1828)

Noé, bishop of Lescar, delivered this speech to the King’s Dragoons, an elite group of Louis XVI’s troops, after they had just returned from America. In September 1781, the dragoons aided George Washington’s army at the Battle of the Chesapeake, a critical turning point in the American Revolution that sealed the British general Charles Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown. This copy was bound for Noé’s nephew, Louis Charles de la Baig, who was the French unit’s
second-in-command under General Lafayette. The decorative elements in the dentelle commemorate the victorious dragoons, while a glorified France is literally placed on a pedestal.