The Manuscripts' Secret History

During a summer afternoon of 1862, Lewis Caroll, professor of mathematics at Oxford, takes for a ride the three daughters the dean of the college, one of her is Alice.

Before settling in the quiet reserves of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the manuscript of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables followed the eventful life of its author. Seventeen years passed between the beginning and the end of the writing of this masterpiece, between Paris, Guernsey and Waterloo. It was a long creative process and not only because the manuscript has 828 leaves.

Kafkaesque. That's the word that fits to describe the incredible, even miraculous, journey of the manuscript of Kafka's Trial, before it found refuge in the heart of the Literary Archives of Marbach in Germany.

Mozart himself said about his Don Giovanni: this work is divine; it is perhaps even more beautiful than ‘The Marriage of Figaro’. Composed between Vienna and Prague, the original score of Mozart's Don Giovanni was passed from hand to hand after Mozart's death... Until the singer Pauline Viardot acquired it in London and established a veritable cult around the object in her Parisian salon.