It has been described as a courtroom battle from beyond the grave: a complex literary saga of locked safes, secret keys and the 160-year-old question over who owns the original manuscript of the memoirs of the great French Romantic writer François-René de Chateaubriand.
Pascal Dufour, 58, a French lawyer, is facing trial in Paris this week for “aggravated breach of trust” after he attempted to sell the only complete original manuscript of Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, Chateaubriand’s life story, once hailed as “the greatest of all French autobiographies”.
Dufour denies the charges, saying he is the rightful owner of the 3,514 pages collected in 10 volumes, which generations of his family looked after and passed down to him.
Chateaubriand led a colourful life as a writer, politician and ambassador who did a deal with his publisher towards the end of his life that he would write his memoirs but only if they were published after his death. First he stipulated that 50 years should pass before publication, but – in need of cash – he relented, agreeing that they could be made public just after his death.
In exchange for an advance payment, the manuscript, handwritten by Chateaubriand’s secretaries and signed by him, was carefully handed to a notary in 1836 for safe keeping. In the presence of his publisher and lawyer it was placed in a safe, sealed with wax and locked up with three keys.
In 1847 it was replaced with a fuller, revised version, which was locked up with the same care.
Chateaubriand died the following year and the work was published, laying bare the deeds and inner melancholy of a writer who had witnessed events ranging from the court of Louis XVI to the rule of Napoleon and life under the Restoration. It made such an impact that a young Victor Hugo was reported to have said: “I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.”
Meanwhile, the original fully-revised manuscript stayed at the notary’s office. That notary died and another firm took over whose family line ran down through the centuries to Dufour, with each generation of lawyer continuing the family trade and carefully passing down the manuscript.
When, in 2012, Dufour decided to sell the document – which had an estimated value of 500,000 euros (£365,000) – the auction house made the standard checks with authorities.
But the state prosecutor stepped in and opened an inquiry, deciding that Dufour, as a lawyer, was only the safe-keeper of the document and had no right to sell it. Dufour’s legal team argued that Chateaubriand’s manuscript had been abandoned by the publishers more than 160 years earlier and that he was now the rightful owner.
The state prosecutor said the manuscript should be restored to Chateaubriand’s descendants, but as the writer had no children, investigators began a quest to find the descendants of his siblings. A descendant, Guy de La Tour du Pin, was found, and detailed his long family tree to police, saying that although he did not want to sue, the manuscript should return to the heirs.
Then came a twist. Dufour’s wife is also a descendant of Chateaubriand and a cousin of de La Tour du Pin.
However, Dufour’s legal team argued that finding Chateaubriand’s descendants was a red herring because the writer had specified in his will that all copies of the manuscripts should be burned without being read, which, they argued, excluded them being passed down to any heirs.
In his political writings, Chateaubriand once described justice as the bread of the nation: “it is always,” he wrote, “hungry for it”. Some wonder what he might have made of this.
The case continues.
