« ah ! le foutu Dieu ! »

Autograph letter of Joris-Karl Huysmans signed to Camille Mauclair, 44 lines written in black ink, 3 pages on a folded sheet, handwritten correction of the author.
Two restorations using strips of paper in high and low fold of the letter, the second band very slightly affects a word of the text, a fold inherent in the enveloping of the letter.
A long and beautiful letter in which all Huysmans' respect and interest are shown for the writings of the young Symbolist generation.
Both author and literary critic, Huysmans embodies a central figure for young poets, like the 22-year-old Camille Mauclair, who sends him one of his first poetic collections: " The chapter on the symbol is perfect ; it is certainly the first time that we explain and with such lucidity, we put things back in place. "
Heart of the symbolism and the poetic fiber of Huysmans, the music of the language is particularly honored both in the lyrics and in the author's writing: " the pieces on death, on sensuality, are woven into the most vivid language [...] and the fine writer who found the cold and ethereal absentee, who wrote such sentences: "we strive to determine our true ghost in the tumult of appearances ". "
Introduced by the mention of the myth of Narcissus, Symbolist figure par excellence, the letter shows the philosophical questions that underlie the movement. « Narcissus is God - It is not very beautiful to contemplate the soul ... It is true that you, in a melancholy return on the vanity of being, have shown in a vibrant page the actors of ourselves as we are.
The mystical evocations, direct to Satan and more ambiguous to God, echo the literary conversion of Huysmans who, in 1894, prepares the writing of En Route , the first part of his trilogy, during direct "black book" that is there : "Ah! the damn God! Really that makes me dream of a literature that feeds less his Satan, as you say, to a literature of humility! "
Accustomed to digressive theoretical reflections on literature, Huysmans concludes his letter with: " At bottom, I am stupid to quibble over ideas, because, in short, all the ones we express and that we will make are already, in d ' other times, and they are more or less new, depending on whether they are more or less forgotten, but what is not done before you, what you own is the way to coat them. And that's where I admire you wholeheartedly, because those are your sentences. "