"Sais-tu qu'avant quinze jours je serai auprès de toi ? [...] Puis-je espérer que d'ici là tu auras repris un peu de forces ?"

Autograph letter signed by Pierre [Louÿs], addressed to his father, four pages written in black ink on a double sheet of white paper. Transverse folds inherent to folding for mailing.
This letter was sent by the young Pierre Louÿs while he was studying at the Janson-de-Sailly lycée (Paris - 16th arrondissement).
This is very likely one of Pierre Louÿs's last letters to his father, ten days before the latter's death: "Do you know that in less than two weeks I will be beside you? [...] May I hope that by then you will have regained some strength?"
The question of Pierre Louÿs's 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 first names Pierre Félix. This late birth, the differences in character between father and son, the first's disaffection toward the second, 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 none will probably ever be discovered. Nevertheless, certain letters [...] are quite troubling. 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 midst 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 of 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 Japan paper copy of the first edition of Pausole: To Georges, his eldest son / Pierre." (Jean-Paul Goujon, Pierre Louÿs)
Pierre Louÿs was only nine years old when his mother died suddenly. The father from then on entrusted his education to his brother Georges, twenty years his senior, and Pierre then joined him in Paris where he attended the École Alsacienne then the Janson-de-Sailly lycée.
Despite the little affection shown to him, the young man writes every week to his "dear papa," residing at Dizy-Magenta near Épernay. The young man inquires about his poor health: "May I hope that by then you will have regained some strength? No doubt. Your eczema, we hope, will not have worsened; and the green leaves that are beginning to appear will perhaps give you hope yourself, for improvement next summer." The "improvement" would sadly never come, and Pierre Philippe Louis would breathe his last on April 14, 1889. In the meantime, Pierre Louÿs gives family news, more precisely about Germaine, his sister Lucie's daughter: "Today I went to rue de la Santé to get news of Germaine. I found the little one who had been operated on in very good condition, very cheerful and in good health. She was up, and playing on the floor. [...] Finally I ended my day by going to my aunt Marie's and to Elisabeth's. Everyone is well in both houses..." As usual, always anxious not to disappoint his father, he finally transmits his school results: "I return to the lycée tomorrow (did Georges tell you that I was second in English?)"