Napoleon love letter creates sparks at auction
A love letter written by Napoleon to Joséphine that was lost and found in a Swiss house has been sold for $557,000 (SFr678,000) – more than five times its estimate.
London auction house Christie’s said the total price bid for items from the collection of the late Albin Schram, a wealthy Austrian banker who lived in the Swiss city of Lausanne, was $7,730,128 – double the pre-sale estimate.
The love letter is one of only three known to have survived from the French emperor’s passionate three-month affair preceding his marriage to Joséphine de Beauharnais.
The letter was written one morning after a heated argument, apparently over Joséphine’s wealth. Napoleon’s touching reply admits that he had been angry and declares his love: “I send you three kisses – one on your heart, one on your mouth and one on your eyes.”
It was given to Schram by a family member in 1973 and was the inspiration for the banker’s extraordinary collection of almost 1,000 documents including letters by Sir Winston Churchill, Peter the Great, Sir Isaac Newton, Gandhi and Queen Elizabeth I.
Schram, who died two years ago, kept the documents in a filing cabinet. He followed his passion in auction rooms in London, Paris and Germany, usually bidding in person, said Thomas Venning, director of Christie’s books and manuscripts department.
The Austrian’s interests spanned Russian poets, Argentine authors, French philosophers, English politicians and Italian sculptors.
Hoarder
Though an inveterate collector, Schram was not interested in conserving or displaying the letters and when he died in 2005 his family barely knew where the documents were.
Among the finds in Schram’s cabinet was a letter by Gandhi which was withdrawn from the sale so it could be acquired by the government of India.
That letter, written 19 days before Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, pleaded for tolerance toward the Muslim minority.
An 1831 letter written by Russian author Pushkin, said to be only the second by his hand to appear at auction for more than 30 years, sold for $290,000, which nearly doubled its pre-sale estimate.
Pushkin wrote to Baron E. Rosen, editor of the almanac Altsiona, saying he could not offer any short works for publication because he was busy preparing the third edition of his poems.
A manuscript by Newton in which he compares his views on gravity and the universe with those of Plutarch, Aristotle and Plato, sold for $411,000, four times the top estimate.
swissinfo with agencies
Schram was born in Prague in 1926 to Austrian parents, both of whom were from established Austrian industrial families.
He studied law at Vienna University and was active in the justice ministry in Vienna and in banks in Germany and Switzerland.
In later life, he devoted himself to private studies in legal history. He began collecting autograph letters in 1973, assembling an exceptional and comprehensive private collection, which was almost unknown to his family.
570 lots of handwritten manuscripts by many of the most notable figures of European history from the 13th to the 20th centuries went under the hammer.
They included letters by Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth I, Sigmund Freud, Napoleon, Isaac Newton, Oliver Cromwell, Claude Monet, Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Brontë.
The auction had five sections: history, literature, art, science and philosophy, and music and theatre.
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