Rare first edition of Proust’s ‘Swann’s Way’, from collection of fashion mogul Pierre Berge, sells for record US$1.7 million
- The Sotheby’s sale set a record price for a French book
![A copy of Marcel Proust's 'Du cote de chez Swann' ['Swann's Way'] that sold at Sotheby's for 535,500 euros last year. Another copy has just sold for almost triple that amount. Photo: Agence France-Presse](https://cdn.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1200x800/public/images/methode/2018/12/15/147bdca0-fff9-11e8-93b7-146c6b325962_1280x720_075209.jpg?itok=HcGYFlop)
A first edition of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (Du cote de chez Swann) sold for €1.51 million euros (US$1.7 million) in Paris on Friday, a world record for a French book, auction house Sotheby’s said.
The rare copy of the first volume of the French writer’s masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past, had been expected to go for between €600,000 (US$678,000) and €800,000 (US$904,000).
It smashed the previous record for a piece of French literature held by the poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, a copy of which sold for €775,000 (US$876,000) nine years ago.
The copy of Swann’s Way is the very first from a numbered, luxuriously bound edition of the novel that Proust paid for himself and gave to his friend Lucien Daudet.
The novel includes the famous “madeleine moment”, when the taste of a little almond cake dipped in tea sets off a flood of nostalgic memories for the book’s narrator.
It was the star lot in the fourth part of the mammoth sale of the library of the late French fashion mogul Pierre Berge.