This binding was made in Paris for Marie-Adélaïde, daughter of Louis XV. The Office de la Semaine Sainte contains the Mass and prayers for Holy week. It was very popular in the 17th and 18th centuries and appeared in many editions, often finely bound with the arms of the French royal family and their court. The 1728 edition is dedicated to the Queen of France, Maria Leczinska, wife of Louis XV. Marie-Adélaïde was their sixth child and fourth daughter. She was born at Versailles on 23 March 1732 and was brought up there. She was intelligent and beautiful, fond of luxury and accomplished in music. She never married nor did her younger sisters, Madame Victoire (11 May 1733-7 June 1799) and Madame Sophie (27 July 1734-3 March 1782). Madame Adélaïde was proud, dominant and ambitious. She was also learned and had a great influence on her father. After the death of Louis XV she kept her apartments in Versailles, but preferred often to reside in the Chateau de Bellevue at Meudon. She was the only true bibliophile in the family and had the largest library of the three sisters, all of whom had their books bound in gold-tooled bindings with their arms in the centre. Although the arms are identical, the books are differentiated by being bound in differently-coloured goatskin. Those for Madame Victoire are green, Madame Sophie’s bindings are citron, while Madame Adélaïde’s bindings are red. Her library in Meudon is said to have contained 10,580 books.¹ In February 1791 the two surviving sisters fled France, first going to Rome, where they were under the protection of the Pope. Then in 1796 they went to Naples, three years later to Corfu and thence to Trieste, where Madame Victoire died of cancer in 1799 and Madame Adélaïde died a year later. 

The roll used on the binding illustrated here is roll no. 38 in Giles Barber’s Waddesdon catalogue and was used on two treatises on gardening (1709 and 1718), bound together, decorated with the arms of Louis XV (Catalogue no. 196) (see note 1 below). Madame Adélaïde possessed another edition of the Office de la Semaine Sainte, printed in Paris by the widow Mazières in 1746, bound in red goatskin and tooled to the same design as the binding illustrated here and with identical tools. This was sold in Paris at the Hotel Drouot (15 November 1971, lot 113). 

Mirjam Foot 

¹ Barber 2013, vol. I, p. 495. A catalogue of Madame Adélaïde’s books was made in 1786 and is now in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris: see Quentin- Bauchart 1886, vol. II, pp. 123-155.