Evans, an American expatriate living in Paris who’d grown rich and respected as the dentist to Napoléon III. Philadelphia? Suffering from one of his periodic bouts of acute insolvency, Félix sold the album at auction in the early 1890s. This particular livre d’or, an astonishing record of the rich cultural life of Paris during the Second Empire, is stored in a rare-book library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Félix was very proud of his collection of autographs, each one a token of friendship or a link with an eminent individual. Many signed and left only a brief remark, if any others spent hours over a drawing or a watercolor, leaving on the page work of impressive quality. If you came to sit for a portrait (or a caricature, in the early days on the rue Saint-Lazare), and if you were an artist or a celebrity or preferably both, he would pester you to sign and leave a memento: a quip, a sketch, a poem, a few bars of music.
The album is a livre d’or, one of several guest books or autograph albums he kept in successive studios. Detached, the leather-bound front cover, with Félix Nadar’s flamboyant signature stamped in the center in gold leaf, lies in a cardboard box looking scuffed and forlorn, like exiled royalty. The book, the size of a large photo album, has been disassembled, its two hundred-odd pages cut out and placed each in its own transparent protective sheath.
The book’s appendix takes a closer look at one of Nadar’s most treasured mementos. Begley’s new book, The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera- a biography of the fabled Parisian photographer Félix Nadar-is out this month. Adam Begley interviews Ali Smith in our new Summer issue.