"...vous savez bien qu'il n'y a pas dans mon cœur, la moindre indifférence. Thadée a du vous dire combien nous avions partagé votre douleur."
Autograph letter signed by Octave Mirbeau addressed to Alfred Natanson
Moving autograph letter signed by Octave Mirbeau, addressed to the playwright and founder of the Revue Blanche, Alfred Natanson when he had just lost his father. 18 lines in black ink on a folded sheet, envelope included.
"Mon cher Fred,
Je ne vous ai pas écrit ; mais vous savez bien qu'il n'y a pas dans mon cœur, la moindre indifférence. Thadée a dû vous dire combien nous avions partagé votre douleur. Thadée a dû vous dire souvent quelle amitié profonde, j'ai pour vous. Peut-être ne vous l'ai-je pas exprimée, telle que je la sens, mais je la sens fortement, et je voudrais bien que vous la sentiez aussi un peu. C'est un gros chagrin que de ne plus être aimé de ceux qu'on aime véritablement. Vous allez partir ; et vous faîtes bien de quitter cette maison où durant plus de six mois, vous avez assisté à l'horrible agonie de votre pauvre père. Tâchez de travailler pour notre joie à tous... et revenez avec une belle œuvre[...]" ["My dear Fred,
I have not written to you; but you know well that there is not the slightest indifference in my heart. Thadée must have told you how much we shared your grief. Thadée must have told you often what deep friendship I have for you. Perhaps I have not expressed it to you as I feel it, but I feel it strongly, and I would very much like you to feel it too, a little. It is a great sorrow to no longer be loved by those one truly loves. You are going to leave; and you do well to quit this house where for more than six months, you witnessed the horrible agony of your poor father. Try to work for all our joy... and return with a beautiful work[...]"].
Mirbeau was particularly close to the group of the Revue Blanche, since its launch in Paris in 1891. But it was since the Dreyfus affair that his intimate and lasting friendship with the Natanson brothers, Thadée, Alexandre and Alfred, was strengthened. After aesthetic disagreements about Art Nouveau and the Nabis, Mirbeau finally reunited with Thadée around 1900, in a now common inclination for the young Nabis painters of the Revue Blanche, Bonnard, Vallotton and Vuillard.
The Revue Blanche played an essential role in France, as confirmed by historian Paul-Henri Bourrelier: "Most of the most prominent writers, painters, musicians, politicians, and intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries collaborated with it or were associated with it. Created, financed and directed by the three Natanson brothers, young Polish Jews, with the enthusiastic complicity of their classmates from the Condorcet lycée, La Revue blanche quickly became a place of debate on all subjects that stirred France. It waged political battles under the impulse of anarchists like Fénéon, Mirbeau; socialists, such as Blum, G. Moch, Péguy; Dreyfusards and founders of the League of Human Rights, like Reinach and Pressensé."
