The La Forte Collection, 1783-1797
Collection Number: 4711

The La Forte Collection: What I Recall About Its Acquisition
By Henry Guerlac

In the summer of 1966, on the day before my departure for the U.S., I paid a farewell visit to the bookstore of Lucien Scheler and bought a modest pamphlet on the gunpowder industry during the French Revolution. Scheler asked, "Are you really interested in the powder administration (Régie des poudres)?" I said I certainly was because of Lavoisier's well-known involvement in it as scientific director. He then asked when I was flying to the States, and I said I was leaving from Orly the following early afternoon. "Get all packed, check out of your hotel and meet me at 9 a.m." at an address I have now forgotten, which turned out to be the apartment-cum-bookstore of a Mr. Bernstein (I think I have the name correctly) who is a specialist of particular elegant and/or rare French 18th-century works.I followed instruction, met Scheler as arranged and was taken upstairs to Bernstein's book-lined apartment. Here I had expected to be shown a book or two, or at most a small package of manuscripts. Instead, every inch of every table or working surface was covered with small packages and folders containing documents: the entire official records of a provincial administrator of the Régie, from before the Revolution until (as I recall it) about 1793. Besides technical drawings, a manuscript textbook of chemistry, there were numerous letters of Lavoisier and of members of the Committee of Public Safety.I said I was certain Cornell was interested, so I was entrusted with a lightly bound typed inventory to show the officials of the Olin Library. This I brought with me in my briefcase to Ithaca. I handed it over to Dr. Reichmann, discussed it with him and the then Director of Libraries and suggested that perhaps Mr. Arthur Dean, with his interest in books and manuscripts dealing with French history, might provide the money. Dr. Reichmann -- and I believe President Perkins -- felt that too many demands had recently been made upon this generous donor to Cornell.The typed inventory was sent over to Day Hall for the President's perusal. For weeks there was no response, and finally it was confessed that this important document had disappeared; the last bit of evidence was that President Perkins had taken it with him on a trip to South America along with other papers he proposed to read on the airplane. For months the inventory seemed to be lost and -- obviously -- no progress was made in finding a donor for the La Forte archives. Meanwhile -- without admitting to Scheler what had happened to the inventory he had entrusted me with -- I wrote repeated and encouraging notes to Paris reassuring him (on no grounds whatsoever) that Cornell was sure to find the necessary source of funds.At last, after several frantic calls to Day Hall, Dr. Steven Muller, then Vice President for University Development (and now President of The John Hopkins University) turned it up. Still there was no progress through the remainder of the winter and the spring. I did not learn that a donor had been found until the occasion of the Academic Procession at Commencement of 1967. As the Faculty marched past (and appropriately, below, I suppose) the President, Trustees, and sundry hangers-on grouped on the terrace of Olin Library, President Perkins called down, "Henry, you've got your papers." Evidently, President Perkins had buttonholed the man we had originally suggested in September, Mr. Dean, and got a willing affirmative answer. There is a bit of background worth giving in conclusion. The La Forte papers were the joint possession of Scheler and Bernstein ( it was the latter, I believe, who first located the La Forte papers, and brought Scheler into the arrangement as a partner in the purchase). When we discussed, before my departure from Paris, the possibility of Cornell purchasing the papers, I asked an obvious question. Since the collection had been in Paris for a number of years, why had it not been sold to the Dupont Historical Library (the Eleutherian Mills Historical Library). In fact it had been offered to them (at a price notably higher than the one Cornell paid) and rejected. I remarked that this was incredible for it would have been a precious acquisition for a library concerned with the early history of the Dupont family and the powder plant on the Brandywine. Scheler -- as honest a member of that shrewd and competitive profession as one could hope to find -- told, rather ruefully, the following story, almost asking my judgment that he had not been wrong or disingenuous in this matter. Some years before, on the eve of his departure with his wife, Denise, for a vacation in Brittany, a crude and poorly researched catalogue crossed his desk. He went through it rapidly and thought -- it seemed incredible -- that one poorly described item might be the (or an) original holograph of the Commercial Treaty of 1785 drafted by Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours.Willing to gamble and risk the modest price, he ordered it. It cost, as I recall his telling me, the equivalent of about thirty or fifty dollars. Returning some weeks later, he found the package at his office and quickly verified his suspicion: it was the famous treaty. Needless to say, he sold it to the Dupont people for something like three thousand dollars (maybe more, I've forgotten the figure). It has since been a show piece of their collection. Some months or years later the people at the Dupont Library ran across a copy of the old catalogue from which Scheler had ordered the document, noted the low price he had paid, and computed the fantastic profit he had made. They were furious, and evidently resolved never to do business with Scheler. So when he offered the La Forte archives to them at a stiff but fair price (more than he asked Cornell to pay) they turned him down. When Scheler told me the story in an injured tone, I had to agree that he had earned his profit by his learning, accumulated experience, perspicacity, and willingness to take a small risk.

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