Ahora

Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé / Pierre Bergé’s Library

AUCTION RESULTS

The sale of the Bibliothèque de Pierre Bergé in association with Pierre Bergé & associés concluded yesterday night in Paris with an outstanding total of €4,8M.

The sale was preceded by exhibitions in Paris, Brussels and London, that gathered many visitors, booklovers and readers.

Les Noces d’Hérodiade by Stéphane Mallarmé soars to €587,720 the highest price of the two-day sale. It’s followed by Gustave Flaubert’s Par les champs et les grèves, some 300 autograph pages with innumerable crossing-outs, corrections and additions literally slashing the text, which achieved € 537,880.

AUCTION DETAILS

Pierre Bergé & Associés in association with Sotheby’s

The second part of Pierre Bergé’s library, to be offered at the beginning of November, is dedicated to 19th-century European literature. The catalogue will be divided into four sections with first part featuring the precursors: the pre-Romantics, Gothic novels and the Marquis de Sade and the second concentrating on the European Romantic movement. The third section will focus entirely on Pierre Bergé’s favourite writer: Gustave Flaubert while the final chapter will feature Modernist writers, from Baudelaire to Zola.

This second sale also reflects Pierre Bergé's singular vision, inspired by both the literary virtues and the delight of the reading experience. Among the highlights are the autograph manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s l'Histoire secrète d'Isabelle de Bavière, reine de France; Stendhal’s own annotated copy of Promenades dans Rome; Gustave Flaubert’s extraordinary autograph manuscript of Par les champs et les grèves; and Stéphane Mallarmé’s autograph manuscript of Noces d'Hérodlade.

Bergé’s taste is also embodied in the selection of works with inscriptions to and from various intellectual and artistic figures of the 19th century: Balzac, Nerval, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Musset, Stendhal, Flaubert, Verlaine, etc. Pierre Bergé built his library with no cultural borders and sought out the works of his favourite authors in their original language. Among these we find works of literature in Russian (Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev), English (Walpole, Byron, Shelley, Swinburne, Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde) as well as German (Kleist, Hölderlin, Goethe, Schiller) and philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Marx and Kierkegaard. Americans are also included in the collection (Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, who was first introduced to the French public by Charles Beaudelaire).

DISCOVER THE CATALOGUE

Exhibitions:

Brussels : 14, 15 & 16 October 2016
Pierre Bergé & associés – 47, avenue du Général de Gaulle, 1050 Bruxelles

London: 27, 28, 29 & 30 October 2016
Sotheby’s London – 34/35, New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA

Paris : 4, 5, 6 & 7 November 2016
Drouot-Richelieu – 9, rue Drouot, 75009 Paris

Experts at Pierre Bergé & Associés:
Stéphane Clavreuil and Benoît Forgeot