"Edison est en France..."

Autograph letter signed by Pierre [Louÿs], addressed to Georges Louis. Five pages written in violet ink on a double leaf and a loose leaf. A press article pasted on the recto of the single leaf. Transverse creases inherent to posting.
Fine letter addressed to his brother Georges Louis with whom Pierre Louÿs maintained a very intimate relationship and whom he considered as his own father.
The question of the real identity of Pierre Louÿs's father still fascinates biographers today: "His father, Pierre Philippe Louis, [...] had married in 1842 Jeanne Constance Blanchin, who died ten years later after giving him two children, Lucie and Georges. In 1855, he remarried Claire Céline Maldan, and from this union was born, in 1857, a son, Paul; then, in 1870, our writer, who received the first names Pierre Félix. This late birth, the differences in character between father and son, the former's disaffection toward the latter, the profound intimacy that always reigned between Louÿs and his brother Georges, all this has led certain biographers and critics to suspect that the latter was in reality the writer's father. The exceptionally intimate and constant relationship that Pierre and Georges maintained between themselves all their lives, could be an argument in this sense. Of course, no irrefutable proof has been discovered, and none will probably ever be discovered. Nevertheless, certain letters [...] are quite disturbing. In 1895, for example, Louÿs writes seriously to his brother that he knows the answer to "the most poignant question" he could ask him, a question he has had "on his lips for ten years." The following year, in the full triumph of Aphrodite, he thanks Georges effusively and ends his letter with this sentence: "Not one of my friends has a FATHER who is to him what you are to me." Arguing from the close intimacy of Georges and Claire Céline during the year 1870, and the jealousy that the father never ceased to show toward his younger son, Claude Farrère did not hesitate to conclude in favor of Georges Louis. And what to think of this dedication by Louÿs to his brother on a deluxe paper copy of the first edition of Pausole: For Georges, his eldest son / Pierre." (Jean-Paul Goujon, Pierre Louÿs)
Pierre Louÿs comments in this letter on Thomas Edison's visit to Paris: "Edison is in France. Toward the end of last month, a journalist questioned him. I regret not having kept the article." The writer then launches into a true dialogue, from his memories of said article, paraphrasing the inventor in the manner of a witness who himself attended the interview: "To the simple question "Are you pleased with your trip?" Edison answered with amiable phrases, and immediately, on his own, he brought the conversation to the subjects: Monoplane. War. He said (I only repeat from memory the sense of what I read:) He said in substance: "You are not yet enthusiastic enough about the value of your new weapon: it is formidable. You take aeroplanes for scouts. Say first: combatants. From the heights where the monoplane evolves easily today, there is an effective military power, but especially an incalculable moral power." He explained himself thus: "Give grenades to an aviator who will drop them. Even if they are not very dangerous, even if they rarely hit their target, the entire enemy army will scatter like a flock of sheep under the flight of the eagle. Five, six grenades falling from the sky will provoke panic terror. Nothing is frightening for a crowd like a peril that comes from above." " This "remarkable interview" related by the writer who finds that "the theory is correct," underlines the visionary character of Edison who seems here to relate the facts of the coming First World War. The erudite Pierre Louÿs illuminates this theory of "Edison the prophet" with his classical culture: "It agrees with the old phrases about the limits of bravery: the Gaul fears only that the sky might fall... [...] It agrees with the ancient principle of defense by tower, battlement and machicolation [...] Still the tower is accessible; but the aviator who flies at 1500 m, he is invulnerable like a god of the Iliad."