L6Normandy, France

On 26 April 1803 in Normandy, France, the L’Aigle meteorite arrived just as French scientists were debating whether rocks could fall out of the sky—and L’Aigle’s grand entrance changed the face of science. The report of the L’Aigle phenomenon completed by French scientist Jean Baptiste Biot provided the coup de grace to ending the debate. In addition to his having collected numerous eyewitness accounts, Biot visited the site, mapped the first strewn field and presented evidence to the French Academy of Sciences that the unusual L’Aigle stones appeared similar to other stones that reportedly had fallen out of the sky in Italy and England. Following an examination of the data collected, the Academy acknowledged that rocks do fall from the sky, a notion which did not travel well to the New World. Following news of the L'Aigle meteorite shower, President Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend, “I find nothing surprising about the rain of stones in France. There are in France more real philosophers than in any country on Earth; but there are also a great proportion of pseudo-philosophers there. The reason is the exuberant imagination of a Frenchman gives him greater facility of writing, and runs away with his judgment unless he has a good stock of it. It even creates facts for him which never happened, and he tells them with good faith.”

This specimen is from the collection of Adrien Charles, le Marquis de Mauroy (1848-1927,) a French nobleman and scientist. At one time he had the second largest private collection of meteorites in the world, the bulk of which is now the basis of The Vatican’s Collection of Meteorites.

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalog note.