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Guy de MAUPASSANT

Lettre autographe signée à la Comtesse Potocka : « Dites, Madame, voulez-vous un fétiche ? [...] je porte bonheur moi-même !»

Paris s.d. [début janvier 1884], 10,2x13 cm, 4 pages sur un feuillet double.

Signed autograph letter from Guy de Maupassant to the Countess Potocka, 67 lines in black ink on a letterhead "GM 83, rue Dulong", envelope attached.
This long letter begins with a commission that was made to Maupassant: " I immediately pay for a commission for which I am charged, although I seem to find a little irony in it. The Princess Ourosow, who has just written to me to ask to see her this evening, begs me, in postscript, to remind her of your memory when I see you. Princess Ourosov was the wife of the Russian ambassador to Paris. With the Countess she was part of that worldly gotha ​​that surrounded authors and artists.
The irony he mentions is this: " As reputed perceptive people asserted that all the thought of a woman's letter is in the postscript ... I wanted to fulfill my role immediately 'intermediate. Because of this addition, he deduced: "... that the letter of the Princess, despite what it contains of amiable for me, was addressed to you ..."
This amazing letter then addresses a little-known leaning of Maupassant: his taste for fetishes. He informs his correspondent that: " The hand since she came home seems to me in an extraordinary agitation. This is the famous hand that Maupassant had bought from George Powell. It was through the poet Charles Swinburne (whom Maupassant almost saved from drowning) that the two men met at Etretat in 1868. Powell and Swinburne shared a house there, filled with Powell's collection of curiosities. The hand in question was mummified and it inspired Maupassant twice. A first in 1875 with La Main de l'écorché , then in 1885 with La Main .
This nervousness of the lucky charm makes Maupassant wonder: " Perhaps you were wrong not to keep it as a fetish? He adds: "But I have other singular fetishes. Do you want one? Indeed, he possesses a collection: " I own the shoe of a little Chinese woman who has died of love for a Frenchman. He comments on the potential effects of these objects: " This talisman brings happiness to the desires of the heart. I still have a large copper cross, very ugly, which worked miracles in the village where I found it. But these talismans do not all work as they should: " Since she is at home, she does not. Maybe it's the environment that's bothering her. But it is not the most astonishing: "But what I possess most singular are the two ends of a man deceived by his wife and died of shagreen. The guilty wife kept the husband's foot and horn ... and made them weld together. I do not know what the effect of this object may be. Despite the seriousness of the affair, Maupassant did not abandon his humor: " Say, madam, do you want a fetish?" I add that my friends pretend that I bring happiness myself! I place at your feet this last vegetarian who asks for the preference [...] "
To echo his statement regarding female postscript, he adds two to his letter. The first asked the Countess Potocka to recall Maupassant to the memory of Madame Lambert. This lady was the wife of Eugene Lambert, a painter known for his cats and who frequented the same milieu as Maupassant and the Countess. The second is much more flavourful: " Men should not be attached to the postscript of the same importance as to women. "

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