"Il est excellent, le projet d'ouvrir le Panthéon aux héros qui ont tout offert à la Patrie, jusqu'à perdre leur nom pour elle."

Autograph letter signed by Pierre Louÿs, addressed to Georges Louis. Four pages written in blue ink on four sheets.
Handsome 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 Pierre Louÿs's real father's identity still fascinates biographers today: "His father, Pierre Philippe Louis, [...] had married in 1842 Jeanne Constance Blanchin, who died ten years later after having given 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 them throughout their lives could be an argument in this sense. Of course, no irrefutable proof has been discovered, and probably never will be. Nevertheless, certain letters [...] are quite troubling. In 1895, for example, Louÿs writes gravely 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, at the height of Aphrodite's triumph, 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 between Georges and Claire Céline during the year 1870, and from 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 copy of the first edition of Pausole: To Georges, his eldest son / Pierre." (Jean-Paul Goujon, Pierre Louÿs)
This letter was written after the First World War: "The project to open the Panthéon to heroes who offered everything to the Fatherland, even losing their name for her, is excellent. And it would be, for the archbishopric of Paris, an unhoped-for opportunity to spontaneously render to our great dead of the crypt the respects that it alone in the world denies them. It would thus repair an error that has lasted too long for its glory. Cemeteries are deconsecrated. No theological reason can attribute to them a more religious character than to the basement of a monument surmounted by a colossal cross and sanctified by ashes." Indeed, in November 1920, Charles Dumont, the general budget reporter, expressed his wish to bring the unknown soldier into the Panthéon. Finally, only the ceremony took place there and the remains of the most famous of the combatants remained, as everyone knows, under the Arc de Triomphe. The only soldier to join the Panthéon, Maurice Genevoix, would not enter until a hundred years later, on November 11, 2020.
Louÿs concludes his letter with a very handsome tribute to the writer he has always admired: "One is ill-advised to forbid the faithful such a pilgrimage. They do it. For immense humanity, the earth where Hugo's corpse lay down is holy ground."