In the autumn of 1621 the Protestant city of Montauban shut its gates against the army of Louis XIII and held them shut for close to three months, until the king lifted the siege and went home. This is a journal of what happened inside the walls, kept day by day, and it ends with the tally: twenty thousand cannon shots fired, the besiegers' losses put at sixteen thousand, the town's at six or seven hundred. It was printed in 1624, while people who had been there could still argue with it. The title says it follows an edition printed at Leiden by Godefroy Basson. It does not say where this one was printed, and neither will we.
The dedication is to the Duc de Rohan, who commanded the Huguenot side. So this is a partisan book, written by the winners of one siege in a war they would go on to lose, and that is exactly why it is worth having. Sometime in the last century it passed through Librairie Clavreuil on the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts, one of the old Paris houses, and was put into the green half morocco it wears now.
Four hundred years on, the paper is still clean. Somebody looked after it the whole way.
