La Roche-Guyon, a village on a bend of the Seine some forty  miles to the northwest of Paris, is dominated by the castle it was named after. At the top of a steep cliff, the medieval castle keep, now in ruins, overlooks the water route from Paris to Normandy, while down below a massive fortified manor house overspreads the base of the cliff. This edifice, erected over the course of several centuries, was long the property of the noble family of La Roche-Guyon, which became allied with another ancient noble family, La Rochefoucauld, through a marriage of 1659. The dukes of La Rochefoucauld are the proprietors of the castle to the present day. 

Alas, the castle's website is currently "under construction." But the marvelous Wayback Machine contains a capture of a page with the following information about the historical library on the site:

Library of the duchess d'Enville

In the eighteenth century, the library contained more than 10, 000 books.

Of exceptional quality and an incomparable eclecticism, it included all subjects then considered worthy of interest: travel stories, novels, poetry, essays, drama, science, philosophy, botany, architecture, etc. All were leather-bound and stamped  with the arms of the castle.

This library today has been dispersed, and only the shelves remain, inhabited by "ghosts." The space is magnificent, fittingly quiet, and the white volumes that are lined up on the classified shelves give this place an atmosphere that stimulates the imagination.

The auction of this treasure, which by 1987 included fifteen thousand works, took place at Sotheby's. All the volumes are marked with the seal of the castle, and they are found on the market regularly, especially on the Internet.

The "ghost volumes" are dummy books, all covered in white. Such volumes are occasionally used as placeholders on library shelves when, for instance, a volume is missing or has been shelved elsewhere. The firm Brodart offers a practical product in this line: Brodart Book Dummies. But I know of no other entire library entirely populated by such "ghosts." (An earlier blog post of mine touched on book dummies and other related "non-books," but there is no mention there of ghosts.)

The duchesse d'Enville, for whom the library is named, was the daughter of Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld, duc de La Rochefoucauld and pair de France (1690-1762). He it was who was largely responsible for building up the collection, after a quarrel with Louis XV forced him into exile on his ancestral estate.

The duke had accompanied the king in  the 1744 campaign in the War of the Austrian Succession, which took French armies, headed by their monarch, to Flanders and Germany. They had gotten as far as Metz when Louis was stricken with a mysterious illness and was thought to be at death's door. Alexandre had a highly developed sense of morality, and at this critical juncture, he insisted on keeping Louis's current official mistress, who had come along for the ride, from tending to the king. Louis recovered anyway (a grand party was thrown at his next stop, Strasbourg, to celebrate his recovery—more on this later), but his wrath was now directed at Alexandre. "You will inform M. de La Rochefoucauld that I am very unhappy with his conduct, and that he must remain at La Roche-Guyon pending further orders," he commanded through an intermediary. The further orders only came ten years later, when he was allowed to visit Paris, but not to present himself at court. He thought he had been treated unfairly and had no wish to crave admittance to the king's presence in any event.

During his exile, he undertook a number of ambitious projects to expand the castle and enhance his domains. In his leisure hours, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy, geography, physics, astronomy and other topics of interest to gentlemen of the Enlightenment, amassing much of the noble collection whose ghosts now populate the depleted shelves of the castle library. The celebrated philosophe and encyclopédiste Denis Diderot said of him:

An excellent proprietor, active and industrious, an agronomist, a philanthropist, and a very honest man, M. le duc de la Rochefoucauld was almost the only one in this day and age who lived on his land as a grand seigneur. He did not display his rank through the haughtiness of his manners, but through his outstanding virtues. His immense fortune was used to dispense benefits, to encourage industry, to put poor people in a position to earn a living by their own labor. This spirit of beneficence was perpetuated by his family.

First of the perpetuators was his daughter, Louise Elisabeth Nicole de La Rochefoucauld, duchesse d'Enville (1716-1797). Smallpox, the era's scourge, had wiped out all the direct male heirs to her father's title, so by royal dispensation, she had married a La Rochefoucauld cousin who was created duc d'Enville (also spelled d'Anville), and her son later became the next duc de La Rochefoucauld. Widowed in 1746, she frequently joined her father in his exile in La Roche-Guyon and stayed on in the castle after his death. There and in her hôtel in Paris, she established herself as an important Enlightenment figure in her own right. Her salon was frequented by a who's who of Enlightenment society: authors, politicians, princes  and philosophes  from France and abroad, including the Scot Adam Smith, the Englishman Arthur Young, and the future King Gustav III of Sweden.  Among her correspondents was the great Voltaire himself. As a matter of course, she continued to expand the library that now bears her name, and she ordered the construction of the room in the castle that housed it.

I first learned of the library and its ghost volumes when I was investigating a set of three volumes bought for the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library. Titled Histoire de Grèce, it was a translation from the English of the obscure  British civil servant Temple Stanyan, and we had acquired it for an almost invisible reason: on the very last page of the third volume, the approbation of the French authorities allowing it to be published named the translator. It had been "traduite de l'anglois, de Temple Stanyan, par M. Diderot." That would be the aforementioned Denis Diderot, and this 1743 work was his very first book-length publication. 

Each volume was bound in contemporary dark brown calfskin, and each bore on its front and back cover a gilt coat of arms. Despite an excess of gilding,  I soon identified it as the arms of La Rochefaucauld, and stamps on the title pages led me to the Château de La Roche-Guyon. The rest of the story soon unfolded.

Though the provenance is indisputable, our volumes are not listed in the Sotheby's Monaco catalog of the sale of the library in December of 1987 . It is not known when they ceded their spot on the shelves, where three white ghosts now haunt their former place. However, another work included in the catalog is of interest to the story of the lost library. It is Représentation des fêtes données par la ville de Strasbourg pour la convalescence du roi, the magnificent volume produced by the city of Strasbourg to memorialize an event mentioned above, the celebration held in Strasbourg in 1744 to commemorate the recovery of King Louis XV from his near-fatal illness and his arrival in the former Imperial city. This was duc Alexandre's own copy, in its original binding with the royal cipher in the center and the arms of La Rochefoucauld in the corners. It was probably a gift to the duke from the city, through the offices of its ambitious préteur royale (the intermediary between the city and the crown), who had supervised the production of the luxurious coffee table book. I can imagine Alexandre's feelings in contemplating its oversized engravings were decidedly mixed: this happy occasion for Strasbourg was inextricably bound to the events that had sent him into exile from the capital and the king.

The New York Public Library's Spencer Collection owns two other copies of Représentation des fêtes données par la ville de Strasbourg pour la convalescence du roi . You can read all about the making of this book, which took four years and cost the city a small fortune, in an earlier blog post of mine: Strasbourg's Most Splendid Party. 

(Information on Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld and his daughter, the duchesse d'Enville, is largely taken from Histoire et généalogie de la maison de La Rochefoucauld  by Georges Martin, 1992. Further details are taken from a blog post by Frédéric Barbier, "Les fantômes de la bibliothèque.")