The Cornette de Saint-Cyr house is selling at auction on June 9 a series of letters by classical authors from the collection of a former university and literature lover.
Letters from great 19th century French writers such as Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine are auctioned in Paris on Thursday June 9. They are part of the collection, comprising 345 lots, of a former university and literature lover, Jean-Luc Mercié, sold by Cornette de Saint-Cyr.
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From Victor Hugo, for example, a letter to a journalist and admirer, Auguste Vacquerie, written from Brussels in 1866, is a plea against the death penalty, which will be applied again in Jersey. “Everywhere freedom is denied. Everywhere the ideal is insulted. Reaction thrives everywhere“, laments the author of Miserables, in this missive estimated between 8000 to 10,000 euros. The vacation also offers an autograph letter signed by the writer with an original ink drawing, representing a ship on the banks of the Rhine, addressed to Julie Foucher, the youngest sister of his wife Adèle (15,000-20,000 euros). From Flaubert, four letters to Louise Colet between 1846 and 1853 are estimated at up to 15,000 euros each. One of them refers to the drafting of Madame Bovary: “No lyricism, no reflections, personality of the author absent. It will be sad to read; there will be atrocious things of misery and fetidity“, he promises his former lover. A letter from George Sand is addressed to Flaubert in 1868 (estimate 6000 to 8000 euros), where she complains that he lives cloistered. “You, enraged troubadour, I suspect you enjoy your job more than anything in the world“, she points.
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The 20th century and especially surrealism are well represented in this collection. A collage by André Breton entitled Ghost Team valued between 10,000 and 15,000 euros, as well as a book in English on Salvador Dali with a dedication drawn by the Spanish artist. The most expensive piece (40,000 to 50,000 euros) is an original edition of Julien Gracq’s novel, The shore of Syrtes. It is accompanied by a letter from the author to Jean-Luc Mercié, “a real new page“, according to the auction house, in which he explains his literary project. Another curiosity, an original edition of the novel Emmanuelle, by Emmanuelle Arsan, embellished among other things with a nude photo of the author by Pierre Molinier, is estimated between 7000 and 8000 euros.