The house behind this ledger descends in unbroken line from Nicolas Lupot through Gand and Gand & Bernardel, the leading Paris violin firm of the 19th century. When Gustave Bernardel retired in 1901, his foreman Albert Caressa took over the shop with Henri Français as partner, trading as Caressa & Français; Henri retired in 1920 — the year this register opens. Henri's son Émile Français, who married Lucile Caressa, took sole charge of the house in 1938 and kept it through the Occupation; the late consignment entries and wartime sales recorded here belong to that darkest chapter. Émile's son Jacques Français later carried the two-century tradition to New York as Jacques Français Rare Violins Inc. Besides dealing in old instruments, the firm produced its own numbered 'catalogue' instruments — twenty appear in this register (flagged house-made), and several more in the export journal only.
| N° | Type | Instrument | C. | Bought | From | Buy F | Sold | Sale F | To | Margin % | Held (d) | Ch. |
|---|
| Period | Channel | Sales | Revenue (F) | Median price (F) | Median margin % | Median holding (days) | Implied turns/yr |
|---|
Margin = (sale − cost)/cost where cost = prix de revient when recorded, else purchase + repairs. Consignment entries ("d. …", no cost basis) are excluded from margin. Implied turns = 365 / median holding days of items sold in the period. All francs are nominal: the franc lost roughly four-fifths of its value over 1914–1926 and depreciated massively again under the Occupation, so 1940-44 percentage margins largely measure inflation captured on long-held stock, not trading skill.
Buyer/seller classifications were assigned in two passes: (1) manual flagging of well-documented dealers during transcription, (2) a second-order pass matching recurrent names against the known trade (luthiers, dealers, experts, auction houses, music houses). All attributions in the published CSV have been manually verified against the original register images. Entries numbered "d. X. X." (dépôt) from 1941 onward are consignments, several apparently from the family's own collection, sold mainly to German buyers (Hamma, Laux, Vogelweith) during the Occupation. House-made instruments (the firm's numbered "catalogue" production) are tagged house. The export journal (E.981.8.30, 148 entries, 1926–1939) has been cross-matched to the sales register: 81 entries matched (72 on exact price, buyer and date). Matched entries carry the journal's richer descriptions — maker, year, buyer address, shipping route, customs passavant numbers — shown in the hover tooltips and marked exp. Unmatched journal entries are mostly the firm's own new catalogue instruments (never in the purchase register) and export-only clients. Discrepancy handling: every register/journal difference was checked against the original images and classed as (a) transcription error — corrected in the published CSV (N° 424 true price 3 500 F; N° 561 true price 18 000 F; one export-side typo at N° 45); (b) explained (N° 497: 159 F of shipping & stamps included in the declared value; N° 429: one register row against a four-instrument export batch); or (c) genuine source discrepancy — preserved, both values kept side by side and never averaged (N° 384, 556, 698, 709, where the declared export value differs from the book price). One journal entry has no register counterpart at all (a Claude Boivin 1742, 12 000 F, to a Dutch dealer at The Hague, Dec. 1929). Other identifications confirmed by the journal: "Horg à Zurich" = Hug & Cie; "Dabé" = Dubé (Québec); 1927 Wurlitzer shipments routed via New York (some forwarded to Berlin); Lachmann in Los Angeles by 1937. Dataset, export journal and discrepancy files: GitHub (CC-BY); corrections welcome via pull request.