Note 25 — Boudoir Libraries.

Napoleon was a great lover of small books. 'An insatiate reader while on his travels, Napoleon complained, when at Warsaw, in 1807, and when at Bayonne, in 1808, that his librarian at Paris did not keep him well supplied with books. "The Emperor," wrote the secretary to Barbier, "wants a portable library of a thousand volumes in 12mo., printed in good type without margin, and composed as nearly as possible of forty volumes on religion, forty of epics, forty of plays, sixty of poetry, a hundred of novels, sixty of history, the remainder, to make up the thousand, of historical memoirs. The religious works are to be the Old and New Testament, the Koran, a selection of the works of the Fathers of the Church, works respecting the Aryans, Calvinists, of Mythology, &c. The epics are to be Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telemachus, The Henriade, &c." Machiavelli, Fielding, Richardson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, and Rousseau were also among the authors mentioned.'