1 page, 8vo, on a bifolium. In French. Inviting him for dinner and mentioning returning his violin (his Stradivarius?). (Browned, creased at folds); matted and framed. Unexamined out of frame. 

 

Viotti renewed his acquaintance with Madame de Staël in June 1813, shortly after she had arrived in London, and that fall, he began giving violin lessons to de Staël’s daughter Albertine. “A note from Madame de Staël, probably written in 1814, inviting ‘caro Viotti’ to dinner, assures him that ‘we shall give back the violin which I am keeping as a pledge that you come.’ Would Viotti have left the Buttero in the hands of his imperious friend?” (Warwick Lister, Amico, 2009, p. 283, quoting a similar letter from this same period from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts collection).