BONAPARTE, Jerôme-Napoléon.
Letter signed as governor of Les Invalides to the members of the Conseil d’administration de la Succursale.
Paris, Hôtel des Invalides, 16 February 1849.
Folio (310 x 202 mm), one page written on the recto of the first leaf of a bifolium headed ‘Hôtel Royal [‘Royal’ crossed through] des Invalides. Conseil d’Administration’, signed ‘Jerome’; sometime folded, in an early twentieth-century autograph folder bearing short printed description in French at foot of upper cover.
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Letter signed as governor of Les Invalides to the members of the Conseil d’administration de la Succursale.
Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte (1784–1860) was the youngest brother of Napoleon I and reigned as Jerome Napoleon I, King of Westphalia, between 1807 and 1813. He became governor of Les Invalides when his nephew Prince Louis Napoleon became president of the second French Republic in 1848.
The present covering letter originally accompanied a copy of two ministerial letters outlining the rules concerning ‘hommes punis de la consigne ou de la prison’, specifically deductions made for wine and the replacement of their lost or damaged clothing.
Provenance: the autograph folder in which the letter is preserved is inscribed ‘von Rudolf Goldschmidt’ in pencil at the head. This is almost certainly the German engineer and inventor Rudolf Goldschmidt (1876–1950), inventor of the Goldschmidt alternator radio transmitter. Goldschmidt emigrated to England in 1934.
