ABOUT SCHOOL:

DEEP IN the bowels of Widener, in the sub-sub-basement of "C" West--wedged in between crumbling biographies of Louis XIV, his mistresses and long-forgotten ministers of state--lies a small, burgundy leather-bound book that, so far as I can tell, does not appear in the main card catalogue or the DUC. On one of my many solitary trips to "C" West this semester, I discovered this tiny volume which eventually became the focus for a portion of my senior thesis.

In analyzing the institution of the French royal mistress during the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XV, I have had to combat with skepticism from those who dismissed the project as frivolous. At the beginning of the fall semester, when thesis topics were the stuff of dinner table conversation, mine always provoked the most interested and amused responses.

Suave sophomore males remarked, "So you're doing mistresses. Well, if you need any help with field research, just give me a call." I became known for my infatuation with 18th century gossip. By October, I had acquired nearly cult figure status. "I've heard of you," my French Revolution section leader exclaimed, "You're the girl doing the mistresses!"

IT'S TRUE that titillating and highly popular biographies of the five women I am studying abound, but no attempt has been made to examine the unique sociological niche they inhabited while at court. My task has been to full that gap in 17th and 18th Century French historiography. All of my sources came from Widener, whose collection of historical manuscripts is probably better than the one at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. I found everything I was looking for in the musty subbasement, as well as a few things which I wasn't looking for.

The little book, actually a Harvard bound copy of a 1775 pamphlet published anonymously in the popular press, chronicles the life of Madame du Barry, the last of the "titular mistresses," was one of my unexpected discoveries. I didn't even realize what it was until I got it home one day last November.

I had been poking around the basement for about half an hour, trying valiantly to match the numbers I had copied from the card catalogue with those printed on the bindings of the shelved books, when the title "Mad. la Comt. du Barry" caught my eye. I grabbed it on the way to the elevator.

The book stayed in my room for a few days before I leafed through its pages. When I did, I couldn't believe I was holding a volume published while the last of my mistresses was alive--this was my link to Madame du Barry herself. It is quite possible that du Barry read the pamphlet herself after completing a jail sentence spitefully imposed by her archenemy Queen Marie Antoinette.

BOOKS PUBLISHED before 1800 are not supposed to circulate, my thesis adviser told me. And I immediately brought the volume back to the Library--half in guilty panic that President Bok would appear at my door with the Ad Board in tow, half in fear of breaking some sort of magical spell. Would an 18th Century book vaporize if left out in 20th Century air?

It really didn't matter that I had to return it. I had taken my notes and I had all the information I would need about how the popular press and the popular Parisian press viewed royal mistresses in general and Madame du Barry in particular. More importantly, however, I had been able to hold a piece of the reality I am trying to reconstruct.