[Jean de LA FONTAINE]. False manuscript, Pour la Paix; 3 pag - Lot 275

Lot n° 275
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[Jean de LA FONTAINE]. False manuscript, Pour la Paix; 3 pag - Lot 275
[Jean de LA FONTAINE]. False manuscript, Pour la Paix; 3 pages in-4, address "Au Roy" on page 4 (slight marginal wetness, some small ink corrosions, restored fold slit). Remarkable forgery of La Fontaine's manuscript, made by the very skilled forger Félix-Sébastien Feuillet de Conches (1798-1887). Head of protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a renowned scholar, a friend of painters, and an unrepentant collector, Feuillet de Conches began his counterfeiting activity by replacing certain documents in collections or archives lent to him for his work with skilful copies, the originals enriching his collection of autographs. He then used the forged autographs he made as a bargaining chip to obtain coveted coins. His main specialities were Racine, Boileau, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and La Fontaine, to whom he devoted a cult following, which he manifested in particular by producing a magnificent and unique collection illustrated by artists from all over the world, now a treasure of the Jean de La Fontaine Museum in Château-Thierry. He produced a large number of false manuscripts of fables, which became part of the best collections, including the famous Didot collection, which included another manuscript of this Ode for Peace presented as the original draft with erasures and corrections, in fact based on the variants of the editions (sale Didot, 1878, No. 377). The Ode for Peace was composed in 1659; it was published in the Fables nouvelles (1671), then, in a corrected version, in the Ouvrages de prose et de poésie (Amsterdam, 1685), and finally in the Œuvres diverses (1729 ). The manuscript prepared by Feuillet de Conches includes the 13 quatrains of the poem, with variations on the second quatrain; at the end, the signature "Delafontaine"; on the back of the last leaf, the address "Au Roy".
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