Book Proust gave his lover sells for a record €1.51M
paris — A copy of Marcel Proust’s
Swann’s Way which he dedicated to his “little darling”, sold for €1.51 million in Paris on Friday — a world record for a French book, auction house Sotheby’s said.
The rare copy of the first volume of the French writer’s masterpiece,
Remembrance of Things Past, had been expected to go for between €600,000 and €800,000.
It smashed the previous record for a piece of French literature held by the poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), a copy of which sold for €775,000 nine years ago. The copy of Swann’s Way is the very first from a numbered luxuriously bound edition of the novel that Proust paid for himself and gave as a gift to his beloved Lucien Daudet. —
paris — A copy of Marcel Proust’s
Swann’s Way which he dedicated to his “little darling”, sold for 1.51 million euros in Paris on Friday — a world record for a French book, auction house Sotheby’s said.
The rare copy of the first volume of the French writer’s masterpiece,
Remembrance of Things Past, had been expected to go for between 600,000 and 800,000 euros.
It smashed the previous record for a piece of French literature held by the poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), a copy of which sold for 775,000 euros nine years ago.
The copy of Swann’s Way is the very first from a numbered luxuriously bound edition of the novel that Proust paid for himself and gave as a gift to his beloved Lucien Daudet.
It came with a touching dedication from Proust to his “little darling”.
“You are not in this book. You are too much in my heart that I could never portray you objectively. You will never be (a mere) ‘character’, because you are the better half of its author,” he wrote.
The novel includes the famous “madeleine moment”, when the
taste of a little almond cake dipped in tea sets off a flood of nostalgic memories for the book’s narrator.
It was the star lot in the fourth part of the mammoth sale of the library of the late French fashion mogul Pierre Berge.
The co-founder of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion empire put together one of the world’s greatest private collections of rare and antiquarian books.
They are being sold off in a series of high-profile auctions which began last year and are set to continue in 2019.
Friday’s sale, which included a treasury of classic works from the Renaissance, hit a final tally of more than 8.1 million euros, double the estimate.
“I am very happy. The market has completely endorsed Pierre Berge’s taste,” antiquarian books expert Benoit Forgeot, who helped organise the sale, said.
He said story of Proust’s dedication to the writer and painter Daudet was a “novel inside a novel”. Proust never admitted his homosexuality, although the younger Daudet was clearly his lover.