"Oh ! En 1930 ce sera bien différent sans doute ; mais j'aurai 60 ans dans quinze ans ; et je m'inquiète d'abord de 1917 ; même de 1916."

Autograph letter signed with initial by Pierre Louÿs, addressed to Georges Louis. Two pages written in purple ink on two sheets. Central folds 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 Pierre Louÿs' real paternal identity 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 Christian names Pierre Félix. This late birth, the differences in character between father and son, the former's disaffection towards 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 throughout their lives, could be an argument in this direction. 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 towards his younger son, Claude Farrère did not hesitate to conclude in favor of Georges Louis. And what should we think of this dedication by Louÿs to his brother on a Japan paper copy of the first edition of Pausole: To Georges, his eldest son / Pierre." (Jean-Paul Goujon, Pierre Louÿs)

In this interesting letter, Louÿs discusses at length the difficulty writers face in living by their pen. Titling his missive "Continuation of our conversation about war and literature", he first makes a very pessimistic observation: "In the 16th century? It was even worse! In the 16th, the independent man of letters did not exist at all - to write one needed an office, a benefice, - or land and income, rare fortune among writers. [...] It is only in the 19th century that we find a very small number of conscientious writers living by their pen. And even then... Do you want to count them? Hugo almost alone succeeds. Lamartine fails and is obliged to beg pitifully at the end of his life. Gautier, who had magnificent gifts, only subsists by writing in newspapers [...] you see what I mean: Theatre and Journal." He continues: "That works well in peacetime. - In 1890, l'Echo de Paris inserted prose poems in the first column. - In "[date illegible because crossed out] "le Figaro had a literary supplement. [...] But in wartime, in this century, and ten, twelve or fifteen years after the war, we shall go to the woods no more; the laurels are cut down. Oh! In 1930 it will doubtless be very different; but I shall be 60 in fifteen years; and I worry first about 1917; even about 1916."

This very pessimistic letter was written at a period when Louÿs was at his worst "The man who wrote these pages was a solitary man, reclusive, sick, drugged, surrounded by dubious creatures and having as confidant only this adored brother who would die less than a year later." (Ibid.)