12 Francs, Plus Interest

France's Honore Daumier had a way of drawing out the nobility of commonfolk and the commonness of nobility from beneath wrinkles and warts. Dela croix used his works as models for copy ing. In admiration, Novelist Honore de Balzac said of him: "That fellow has Michelangelo under his skin." Yet the world's most famous satirist with brush and pen cost his country 12 francs in 1879 to be put into a pauper's grave.

At Paris' Palais Galliera last week, Daumier earned back the 12 francs, with interest, as the largest group of his works ever put up for auction went on the block. The 338 sculptures, drawings and lithographs were only a fraction of the collection of a French banker and founder of breweries through out North Africa named Rene Gaston-Dreyfus, 80, who began buying Daumiers before World War I.

The scene was worthy of Daumier's pen. Discreetly dressed bourgeois bid ders hid all signs of buying fever, ex cept for a lady who offered $1,600 for a charcoal drawing, Buffoon and His Monkey, in a Landscape, then protested that she did not mean to get that one. The auctioneer rebuked her: "Madame, that's impossible. You've been bidding for five minutes and the object is right in front of you. I regret it, but it's yours."

Top bid was $67,551 for a plaster caricature of an imaginary middle-class know-nothing called Ratapoil. Next highest was $59,591 for a life-size plas ter bust executed around 1855 of Dau mier himself, complete down to the wrinkles and warts. Bidding for the 14 drawings was lively enough to bring prices up to $17,346 for a single one. Buyers were mostly private European collectors, who seem to have recaptured some of the enthusiasm of Balzac. To tal take: a staggering $617,000.

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