After I joined the American Numismatic Association I began attending the conventions they held each year, thereby gaining access to a less chauvinistic group of dealers, including European dealers with their tempting offers, many of which were too costly for me even to consider. I acquired an exceptional medal at one of those conventions, a gold-filled medal issued for a man who was in First Consul Bonaparte's first senate. Henry Grunthal informed me that only eighty of those were issued.
In addition to mailed price lists and dealers at conventions there were auction sales. Buying from auctions by mail sight unseen is a risky business; I have perhaps been lucky in the bids I have made. In one case I had a narrow escape from financial catastrophe. Richard Margolis, a friendly collector-dealer from whom I had bought several Napoleonic medals told me to go to the Bank Leu table and ask to see the proofs for the plates of their upcoming sale of Napoleonic medals. Mr. Divo showed me the six color plates for the sale they would be holding, the sale of Prince Victor Bonaparte's collection of commemorative medals, including about two hundred gold medals which had been struck for Napoleon I. I asked what he thought the medals might bring; he replied that because of their extreme rarity it was impossible to guess; he was going to estimate 5000 SFr. He put me down on the subscription list for the catalog. After returning home I investigated and found that neither Julius nor Essling had a forty millimeter gold medal from the 1815 Medal Mint list, which underlined their rarity. The statement that only two copies of each were struck in gold, one for the national collection and one for Napoleon's personal collection, was refuted by Griffiths, who found contemporary mint records of collections of the gold medals sold to Josephine, Maria Louisa, and others, but those have not appeared on the market. In about 1830 a theft at the Bibliotheque National included part of the set struck for the nation, but apparently those medals were melted down; they have never appeared on the market.
The sale of Prince Victor's collection took place in two sessions, the first consisted of coins and medals issued by Napoleon I's relatives and generals outside France. The second part, Bank Leu's Vente Publique 14, le 15 Octobre 1975, contained 580 lots. I poured over that catalog after it came. Generally the gold copies of the 'standard' medals were estimated at 5000 SFr. I added to my savings the amount I could borrow on my life insurance policy and decided I could scrape up seven thousand francs, so I sent in a bid saying I would pay that amount for any one of the six I had selected. About a week after the sale I received a copy of the prices realized and a note from Mr. Divo: he stated that my bids were good but regretted that the floor bidding was so strong that he could not obtain even one of the medals for me. I did not know whether to laugh or cry.
At that time I knew that I had to have one of the gold medals which had been struck for Napoleon. There were so many in the sale that surely some would be coming back on the market within the next few years. I began conscientiously saving, determined that in spite of my limited means I would not be outbid a second time. I did manage to acquire from M. Gadoury a forty millimeter gold medal, the one presented to a French painter for his entry in the Salon of 1812. (Several years later the French Mint wanted to discontinue making those gold prize medals for the annual exhibitions. It was explained that the prizes should be cash awards, since most of the winners just sold their medals for scrap gold anyway.)
There were other auction sales, some of them containing uncommon medals connected with Napoleon's period. From one I got a gold-filled copy of the medal celebrating 18 brumaire, from another a silver copy of the Marshal Turenne obsequies dating from before the fall of Napoleon. The Paris mint has always made a practice of selling copies of medals struck from the dies they possess, except for those produced for other departments or owned by individuals. In the case of older dies there has been a program to have copies of the old dies made, because the newer, more powerful presses might damage the old dies. Beginning with the reorganization of the medal production in the early eighteen thirties, edge marks have been punched into the platinum, gold, and silver medals, indicating both the period in which they were made and their composition. It was not until about 1840 that edge markings were also applied to copper and bronze examples.
In a later auction I learned the value of having a trustworthy dealer act as my agent at a sale. My systen consisted in fixing on the amounts I would pay for the items in a list but allowing the dealer to use the amounts from items I had underbid on to increase the following bids. Richard Margolis, to whom I gave my trust, did very well for me; I lost a few bids in that sale but acquired several lots which I had underestimated. By the time that sale came up I had learned that the earliest strikes of the medals for the events of 1805 should have an obverse by Droz, although those medals are usually found with an obverse by Andrieu. I acquired several of those earliest strikes from that sale.
One of the facts about forming a collection is that it will eventually be broken up. Even bequeathing your collection to an institution does not insure its preservation intact; the sale of the Garrett collection by the Johns Hopkins University is only one example of that. A less spectacular sale was that of the Napoleonica collected by David Z. Norton during his visits to Paris between 1895 and 1925. The collection was bequeathed to the Western Reserve Historical Society and displayed in splendor in an elegant meeting room for some thirty years before being packed away in the nineteen seventies to make room for other exhibits. A description of this extensive collection, of which the commemorative medals were a minor part, was published in the Journal of Modern History, 32.2, 159: J.H. Stewart, "The Norton Napoleonic Collection". The collection was auctioned off at Christie's East on 19 May, 1998. I obtained one of the British Museum silver electrotypes of Pistrucci's great Waterloo medal in a lot from that sale.
Almost twenty years after the sale of Napoleon I's gold medals I was browsing through a catalog from Leu Numismatik AG (Auktion Leu 60, 24./25. Oktober 1994) and discovered that a few of the forty millimeter gold medals from that earlier sale were again up for bids, one of them (lot 715) one of the medals I had tried previously to obtain. I fired off a bid for a ridiculously high amount and, since no one else was as crazy, finally obtained for my own a copy of a forty millimeter gold medal struck for and owned by Napoleon I, at half the amount of my bid.
