Histoire genealogique des quelques C. L. Maisons de France avec le blason de leurs armoiries, le tout mis par ordre alphab tique.

Folio. 2 volumes. 409, (1); 539, (2) pp. French manuscript in ink with 236 (80+156) full-page hand-painted watercolour coats-of-arms. With a loose leaf with letterpress text reading "Soci t des lettres, sciences et arts de l'Aveyron" and with manuscript genealogical notes in French. Contemporary calf, not uniform. Thoroughly illustrated heraldic manuscript by the French Capuchin monk P re Prosper de Rod s of the Capuchin monastery in the Bishopric of Rodez in Aveyron, southern France. It provides genealogical information and usually also coats of arms, rendered in watercolour, for 279 French aristocratic families, including Amboise, Armagnac, Du Bellay, Champagne, Coligny, Estaing, Du Guesclin, Matignon, Polignac, Pompadour, Sully; Bassompierre, Bourbon, Colbert, Foix, Grimaldi, Mol , Montmorency, Monferrand, Montaigu, Montauban, Noailles, Rohan, Savoye, Sevign , Le Tellier. - P re Prosper de Rodes wrote and compiled several manuscript genealogical works. Le Long records two in the library of the Capuchins in Toulouse in 1771, items 40578 (Histoire de toutes les maisons principales de France, folio, 2 vols.) and 40579 (Histoire g n alogique de tous les Ducs & Pairs de France, folio, 1 vol.). Waroquier de M ricourt records the former still at that library in 1787, and Haenel records the latter at the Stiftsbibliothek in St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1830. Only one of the two present volumes has a title-page, calling it volume V, with additions to the previous four volumes, and its reference to 150 families with their coats of arms agrees fairly well with the 156 coats of arms in that volume. The volume without a title-page is labelled "Tom. III" on the spine. Perhaps these two volumes were separated from the three recorded by Le Long before 1771, making five volumes in total. The Biblioth que d'Etude et du Patrimoine de Toulouse now holds four genealogical manuscripts by Prosper de Rod s (Biblioth que Municipale mss. 455-458), but the titles agree with neither those given by Le Long nor with ours. - Tears repaired in the title-page of vol. 5. Lacking the title-page and three preliminary leaves, as well as ten other leaves: vol. 3, pp. 105-108, 159-160, 249-250; vol. 5, pp. 6-7, 62-63, 146-149, 386-387, 410-411. Several repaired defects in the pages, part of pp. 400f. torn off and missing, a hole in pp. 380f., thumbing in the margins. - Provenance: bookplate of the historian and genealogist Hippolyte Justin de Barrau (1794-1863), founder of the Soci t des lettres, sciences et arts de l'Aveyron, on the front pastedown of volume 3. - Lelong, Biblioth. hist. de la France III, 716 and V, 680. Louis-Charles de Waroquier de M ricourt de La Mothe de Combles, Tableau genealogique, historique, chronologique, heraldique et geographique de la noblesse, enrichi de gravures [.] (Nyon, 1787), 379. Cf. Haenel, Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum, col. 480. For the author cf. Apollinaire de Valence, Histoire des capucins I, 429.