Damongeot-Bourdat,
Les vicissitudes d’une collection de manuscrits : de la cathédrale de Beauvais à la collection Le Caron de Troussures et à sa dispersion au début du xxe siècle
- 2010.
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Coming mostly from the cathedral chapter in Beauvais, the rich manuscript collection owned by the Le Caron de Troussures family was broken up at the beginning of the twentieth century. This article recounts the various episodes of sucessive sales from 1907 to 1912, stressing the role played by Henri Omont, curator of the Cabinet des Manuscrits in the French Bibliothèque Nationale. Along with renowned buyers, e.g. John Pierpont Morgan, or booksellers such as Quaritch or Rosenthal, the erudite librarian managed, by resorting to patronage and by passing some administration rules, to bring back into the national heritage a large part of the manuscripts once in the Beauvais cathedral library, the most ancient dating back to the seventh century. Of the forty-six manuscripts in the Troussures collection, twenty are kept today in the BnF, nine in the New York Pierpont Morgan Library, the remainder being spread between various European and American libraries.