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My news from Paris is that on Jan 30 this cultural jewel, a tiny manuscript written by a youthful Charlotte Brontë in 1830, will go on public display for the first time.
That is an awful long time for the public to have had to wait. So it is good to be able to add that there is a geographical bonus: there are far worse places to find yourself on a winter's day than the vicinity of 222 Boulevard Saint-Germain.
Le Musée des lettres et manuscrits - someone please explain to me why Le not La, but do NOT get me on to the subject of the accent in Brontë - was successful in an auction at Sotheby's in London on Dec 14 in securing the "little book", which measures just 35 x 61mm but nevertheless contains 20 pages with more than 4,000 words of minuscule script.
For Charlotte, then just 14, it was part of a second series of The Young Men’s Magazine, her writing inspired by a set of toy soldiers bought for Charlotte's brother Branwell by their father.
Happiness for the musuem on the Left Bank brought dismay to Haworth, the West Yorkshire village where the Brontë family lived in the house that is now the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Also a fine place to be.
It was the fervent hope of the self-explanatory Brontë Society that it could return the manuscript to where it began, the writer’s home.
"Previously untraced and unpublished", the museum reports, was expected to fetch between £200,000 and £300,000 but in the end sold for £580,000. The Brontë Society was armed with a grant of £613,140 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £20,000 from the John Murray Archive, £10,000 from the Friends of National Libraries and many donations to a public appeal. That looks as if it might have been enough to go beyond the eventual selling price, but for two snags. One they know about, the other they may be about to learn:
* Commission takes the hammer price a lot higher (the total in this case reaching £690,850
* Le Musée des lettres et manuscrits had a lot more up their sleeves in any case. The president told me he had the means to go to €1 million if necessary
But also unknown to Haworth, when I spoke to the collections manager Ann Dinsdale, was the French museums complete willingness to share its new treasure. It will go in display in a Brussels offshoot - significantly, the Belgium capital was the setting for two of Charlotte's four novels.
Ann and her colleagues may wish to read on. This is how I reported the story for The National, Abu Dhabi:
A tiny literary treasure from the childhood fantasy world created by the Brontë sisters will soon go on display in a French museum, after being bought for a record price at auction in London.
Charlotte Brontë, who later wrote one of the best-known novels in the English language, Jane Eyre, used miniature pages and small handwriting to compose a work she called The Young Men's Magazine, Number 2 when she was 14.
The manuscript is set in "Glass Town", a fictional product of the four Brontë siblings' imaginations, using as its characters a box of toy soldiers their father had bought for Charlotte's brother, Branwell.
The biggest part of the contents is devoted to "A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley", purporting to be written by a son of the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon's conqueror and a hero of Charlotte's.
One passage is a precursor to the famous scene in Jane Eyre when the insane wife of Mr Rochester takes revenge for being locked in an attic by setting fire to bed curtains in her husband's chamber.
Lord Charles describes an "immense fire" spreading to the bed, reducing its curtains to ashes.
Charlotte Brontë's manuscripts passed on her death in 1855 to her husband, a clergyman, and were sold to a Gérard bibliographer and collector, T J Wise, in 1895 and later still to a collector in Europe.
Wise was subsequently exposed as a literary forger, a detail noted in the pre-sale catalogue, but of which Lhéritier, the founder and president of the Paris museum that has bought the manuscript, admitted he was unaware. There is no suggestion the item sold at auction was other than genuine.
After being kept from general public view, probably throughout its 180 years of existence, the manuscript - just 35 millimetres by 61mm - was put up for sale this month and auctioned at Sotheby's.
To the dismay of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in the family home in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, its hopes of acquiring the manuscript proved in vain.
It was outbid by Le Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, on the Left Bank of the French capital, which paid a little less than £700,000, the highest recorded for any manuscript by Charlotte or her sisters, Emily and Anne. The pre-sale guide price was £200-300,000. The Parisian museum intends to put the work on public display from January 30.
It already has one of Europe's finest collections of manuscripts and letters, exhibits ranging from the Second World War ceasefire order signed by the US president, Dwight D Eisenhower, on May 7, 1945, to the writings of such French literary giants as Voltaire, Charles Baudelaire and Emile Zola.
But the management of the English Brontë museum, which attracts 80,000 visitors annually, is unhappy it failed to obtain a document it said "belongs in Haworth".
Andrew McCarthy, the museum's director, describes the manuscript as "unquestionably the most significant to come to light in decades and an important part of our broader literary heritage".
Ann Dinsdale, the collections manager, said: "It was a bitter disappointment for us. It would have been more understandable had it gone to Brussels, where two of the four Charlotte Brontë novels are set. The only consolation is that at least it will be available, at last, for the public to see."
The manuscript had not previously been examined by scholars and the sale to a museum means Brontë specialists will now get access.
Ms Dinsdale said that in time, she hopes the Paris museum would agree to a loan so that the manuscript could also be exhibited in what is known as Brontë country.
Money raised for the auction by the parsonage museum, including a grant from Britain's national heritage memorial fund, was enough to support a "hammer price" of £560,000, and cover the substantial auctioneer's commission.
In the event, the French museum was able to go £20,000 higher, leading to a selling price, with auctioneer's commission, of £690,850.
Mr Lhéritier said the manuscript would go on display at the Paris institute's Brussels offshoot but later be available for exhibition elsewhere, including Yorkshire.
"It is a highly important acquisition for us, but also for Europe," he said, adding that with generous help from France's privately funded Association of Friends of Museums, he had been prepared to bid up to €1 million if necessary.
Peter Selley, the senior director in Sotheby's books and manuscripts department, said: "The record price reflects the huge international interest in Charlotte Brontë's work and Sotheby's was honoured to sell a manuscript of such importance and rarity."
He added that the work offered a "fascinating insight into the development of one of history's great literary minds and reveals the preoccupations which would characterise some of the best known scenes in her adult writing".
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