Napoleon manuscript page sold at auction

A single manuscript page from a love story written by Napoleon Bonaparte sold at auction in France today for €23,000, an auction house said.

The item up for sale was the first page of the final draft of Napoleon’s 1795 short novel “Clisson and Eugenie,” said the Osenat auction house, based in Fontainebleau outside Paris.

The page had been part of a private French family collection. The identity of the buyer was not disclosed.

The novel, never published in Napoleon’s lifetime, was loosely based on the author’s brief romance with Desiree Clary, the sister of his brother’s wife.

Scholars only realised the page’s significance recently. It was long believed to be a page from a text Napoleon wrote about a historical figure named Clissot until Peter Hicks, a historian at the Fondation Napoleon, realised it was the beginning of his novel.

Part of the confusion was Napoleon’s messy writing.

“Clisson and Eugenie,” only 22 pages in its original hand-written form, was written when Napoleon was a 26-year-old general. Afterward, Napoleon turned his attention to political matters.