On Friday December 8, PIASA and Jean-Baptiste de Proyart are organizing a sale of books and manuscripts from a private collection.
Comprising 202 lots, this remarkable collection was built up by a passionate and discreet bibliophile. While his entourage and certain academics were aware of the collection's existence, the market was unaware of the grouping of these literary masterpieces. It includes first editions by Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine and many other great poets, as well as over a hundred signed autograph letters, both intimate and literary, written by these authors, and numerous handwritten and autograph poems composed by these same poets.
Lot 64 | HUGO, Victor
The Legend of the Centuries. First series.
Estimate: 20000 / 30000€
"This collection has been built up by interweaving, without any rejection: bringing together the great poets as well as the most minor ones, rejecting from the outset that arbitrary and absolute search for the single masterpiece which today guides many collectors in many areas of the art market. His personal aim was to understand and show, rather than demonstrate. His collection thus organized itself like a living fresco. It traces the great poetic network of this splendid century. In a way, the gesture of his collection pays homage to poets, with bibliophily becoming a tribute to literature."
Jean-Baptiste de Proyart, bookseller and expert
Lot 169 | VERLAINE, Paul
Jadis et Naguère
Estimate: 4000 / 6000€
The poem L'Éternité (lot 138) is one of the seven poems Arthur Rimbaud had printed in Une saison en enfer, in the central section of the book, Alchimie du verbe, where he takes stock of his experiences of derangement and hallucination. Eternity is the climax: a poem of the eternal present ("elle est retrouvée"), of the resolution of opposites (the sea and the sun), of release and elevation ("Là tu te dégages/Et voles selon").
Lot 138 | RIMBAUD, Arthur
Eternity
Estimate: 200000 / 300000€
Charles Baudelaire's two stays in Honfleur from late January to mid-June 1859 were one of the most fruitful periods in his life as a poet. He published Le Voyage and L'Albatros in a placard printed in Honfleur in February, and composed two long poems, Les Sept Vieillards and Les Petites Vieilles. At one point, he considered grouping these last two poems under a generic title, Fantômes parisiens (lot 16), perhaps incorporating a third poem, Le Cygne. The three poems were dedicated to Victor Hugo, from whom Baudelaire hoped to obtain a preface for his booklet on Théophile Gautier (1859). The idea of a series was quickly abandoned. They were included in the Tableaux parisiens section of the 1861 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. The poems first appeared on September 15, 1859 in the Revue contemporaine, edited by Alphonse de Calonne.
Lot 16 | BAUDELAIRE, Charles
Parisian ghosts. - Seven old men.
Estimate: 120000 / 160000€
