Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, Literary museum in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, France.
The Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits was a literary museum in Paris that displayed thousands of letters, manuscripts, and signed documents. The collection was spread across multiple exhibition spaces and focused primarily on works by French writers and prominent historical figures.
The museum was founded in 2004 and initially occupied a different Paris location before moving to Boulevard Saint-Germain in 2010. It closed its doors in 2014 and has not been open to the public since then.
The museum's name refers to its subject: handwritten letters and manuscripts. Its five sections were history, music, science, arts and literature, and the hanging changed regularly. Temporary shows covered subjects such as Piaf and Cerdan's love letters, the Titanic manuscript of Helen Churchill Candee, and two drafts of Breton's Surrealist manifesto. Patrick Poivre d'Arvor was the museum's patron.
The museum occupied a townhouse at 222 Boulevard Saint-Germain in the 7th arrondissement, in the protected sector near the Latin Quarter. It closed in November 2014 and its contents were impounded; the company was placed in liquidation on 1 September 2015. The premises are not open to visitors, and the collections were auctioned from December 2017.
The collection's roughly 136,000 documents included the cease-fire order Dwight D. Eisenhower signed on 7 May 1945, poems by Paul Éluard and a love letter by Théodore Géricault. After the 2014 closure the holdings were impounded, and the first auction sale took place in December 2017, with the State buying many lots.
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