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Trois documents originaux – dessin, lettre et poème

« The Emperor came incognito to Dunkirk this morning, and entered through a door in front of which I was training a battalion of my regiment.

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SET OF THREE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS by the Chevalier de Boufflers.
"Libertine abbot, military philosopher, diplomat songwriter, patriotic emigrant, courtier republican"According to Rivarol, Stanislas Jean de Boufflers, Marquis de Remiencourt, more commonly known as the Chevalier de Boufflers (1738-1815), wrote a number of fugitive plays, a trip to Switzerland, a few academic eulogies and a book on the history of the region. A treatise on free will.
As a young man, he frequented Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the salon of the Maréchale du Luxembourg, and the author of the Confessions will describe it in these terms: "He has many half-talents of all kinds, he writes short verses very well, writes short letters very well, plays a little with the sistrum, and smears a little with pastel paint."

-  Original ink drawing - Antique scene - early handwritten annotation : pen drawing by the chevaliers de Boufflers 1782, ink on paper (105 x 75 mm) mounted on an album leaf.

- Autograph poem signed - ink on paper (105 x 75 mm) mounted on an album leaf. :

"In the course of human life
where to find happiness?
For pleasure in the face of pain
young, with the greatest enthusiasm
of love and the arts;
nothing troubles me old, but old nothing pleases me;
I had the interest without the calm,
I have calm without interest".

- An autograph letter to his beloved, dated 11 June 1781. as Emperor Joseph II passed byDuring his trip to the Netherlands - ink on paper (153 x 192 mm) mounted on an album leaf. :

" If I loved you less as a child I would have written to you sooner, but you are all I [neglect] like the child of the house who is put after everyone else. Ask me for your news, I need it more than you need mine, I'm a bastille and you're a house of cards, it's the only advantageous comparison I can make between us and the one I like least. 
The Emperor came incognito to Dunkirk this morning, he entered through a door in front of which I was manning a battalion of my regiment. He went round the town in a carriage, he strolled along the port under the guidance of a small bourgeois and spoke only to sailors. I only saw him after he had left, he was going to Ostend by the foreshore, I pretended to go and visit the forts on the beach where I have people, and I joined him and saw him on the way. But as it seems that his trip had a purely maritime purpose, he treated me less well than the sailors and all I could get out of him was two big hats. 
[…]
Adieu prodigy of length, I love you from head to toe for as long as you can hear. "

 

 

1781-1782. Sheets,

Bio

Chevalier de Boufflers

Stanislas Jean de Boufflers - Marquis of Remiencourt

(Lunéville: 31 May 1738 - Paris: 18 January 1815)

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