King of manuscripts

The Sadist's Revenge

The original manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom. Joining pages end to end, the Marquis de Sade wrote 157,000 words in three weeks and hid the scroll in the wall of his cell in the Bastille. He died believing it had been destroyed in the prison siege that ignited the French Revolution.

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BY JOEL WARNER \  MAR 27, 2018

Emerging from the morning fog shrouding the art galleries and boutiques of Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, the police arrived at the Hôtel de La Salle at 9:00on November 18, 2014. Once home to the author of France’s code of civil law and, after that, sundry dukes and duchesses, the seventeenth-century mansion was now the headquarters of Aristophil, an upstart investment company founded by Gérard Lhéritier, the son and grandson of a plumber. In just over two decades, the then-sixty-six-year-old Lhéritier—the “king of manuscripts,” as he’d been dubbed by the local media—had amassed the largest private collection of historical letters and manuscripts in the country, effectively cornering the market. Among his 130,000-odd holdings were André Breton’s original Surrealist Manifesto, love notes from Napoleon to Josephine, the last testament of Louis XVI, and fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls./.../