A wedding invitation around MS Sanscrit 1868
Pieces of scrap paper are often used as sleeves or envelopes for manuscripts. The re-use of discarded material was also prevalent in bookbinding, where they were employed to line or repair a binding, or as endpapers — for example, see “The Fix: Binding Waste” (Smith 2014). The result is that material that was once considered ephemera — such as newspapers, catalogs, or even medieval manuscripts — are unintentionally preserved.
The sleeve around MS Sanscrit 1868 is a slip of paper folded in half. In ink, it describes the manuscript as a fragment of a grammatical work (which has now been identified), written in devanāgarī script. It gives the manuscript’s entry in the registry of acquisitions, R. B. 3096, as well as the year of acquisition, 1842. Later, it was given its present shelfmark, Sanscrit 1868, which has been written in pencil.
Once unfolded, the slip of paper reveals itself to be an invitation to the wedding of Julie Petit and John Kelley Snowden, on the 24th of May, 1841:
Paris le 17 Mai, 1841
M
Monsieur Petit, chef d’Institution, et Madame Petit, ont l’honneur de vous faire part du Mariage de Mademoiselle Julie Petit, leur fille, avec Monsieur John Kelly Snowden, Docteur en Médecine.
Et vous prient d’assister á la bénédiction nuptiale que leur sera donnée le lundi 24 Mai 1841, á 110 heures du matin, en l’Eglise St Gervais.
Julie’s full name was Marie-Gabrielle-Julie Petit, and her father, the chef d’institution, was Jean-Baptiste-Vincent Petit, who ran a boarding house at the Hôtel d’Aumont for students at the lycée Charlemagne. Among his students was Edmé-Jacques-Benoît Rathery, who would go on to become a conservator at the BnF. This invitation may have originated from him, although the handwriting on the backside does not match his own.
As you can see, the ceremony was moved from 11 o’clock to 10 o’clock in the morning. Congratulations, Julie Petit and John Kelly Snowden! I hope your guests arrived on time.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Charles Li (October 10, 2020). A wedding invitation around MS Sanscrit 1868. Texts Surrounding Texts. Retrieved March 14, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/uxyx



