A copy of La Fontaine's Fables sold for 378,000 euros

A copy of La Fontaine's Fables bound for the Empress of Russia was sold at auction in Paris on Thursday for 378,000 euros.

These four volumes were part of the library of Pierre Brossette, an industrialist and bibliophile, sold at Christie's.

Published in the 1750s, with engravings by Jean-Baptiste Oudry, they were bound and hand-colored in 1782 as a gift to Maria Feodorovna, the future Empress consort of Russia.

That year, Tsarevich Paul Petrovich, the future Paul I, and his wife Maria Feodorovna, née Sophia Dorothea of ​​Württemberg, visited Paris during a European tour. She received these Fables as a gift, or she purchased them.

"As far as an edition of La Fontaine's Fables is concerned, it doesn't get any better," one of Christie's experts told AFP when presenting the collection.

The sale totaled 6.2 million euros.

A book designated by Christie's as "the finest copy" of André Breton's novel "Nadja," the one bound for the poet René Char, with a handwritten letter from Nadja (Léona Delcourt by her real name) inside, fetched 352,800 euros.

The copy of Madame Bovary dedicated by Gustave Flaubert to Alexandre Dumas sold for 214,200 euros.