brass oval. They declare (in French) that "no apparatus is warranted unless it bears the signature of M[onsieur] Daguerre and the seal of M[onsieur] Giroux". They feature a small red wax seal dated with the year and were actually hand-signed by Daguerre. The Susse Frères camera has a simpler octagonal label claiming only that the camera was made "according to the official plans deposited by M[onsieur] Daguerre at the Ministry of the Interior". Each lens had to be individually hand-made by expert opticians and machinists and it accounted for most of the price of the camera. The Giroux camera sold for 400 francs, the plainer Susse Frères version cost 350 francs. Neither sum represented a casual purchase or was affordable to the average citizen. In 1839, 350 francs meant a pile of silver coins, or a small stack of gold coins containing a total of over three troy ounces of pure gold, or the more convenient gold-redeemable paper equivalent. Although Théodore Maurisset's contemporary humorous lithograph La Daguerréotypomanie depicts a throng of customers besieging the Susse Frères establishment and carrying away cameras at a prodigious rate, and although at least fifteen of the cameras made by Giroux still exist, no examples of the Susse Frères version were known until one came to light in 2006. It was found among the effects of Günter Haase, formerly a Professor in the Department of Scientific Photography at the University of Frankfurt. Haase had received it as a gift from a colleague who died in 1963. It was sold at auction in 2007 for a final price of €580,000. Susse Frères bronze foundry The Susse Frères firm was also engaged in the foundry business and owned a large foundry in Paris. The company is well known for their fine bronze castings with superbly applied patinas. After the death of Pierre-Jules Mène in 1879, the Susse Frères foundry acquired the rights to reproduce his models and produced posthumous proofs marked "Susse foundeur éditeur, Paris". References Foundries Cameras Metal companies of France