"Zola me transmet votre aimable article"

Autograph letter signed by Guy de Maupassant, to the critic Vittorio Pica. 10 lines in black ink on one page of a bifolium.
Horizontal fold and very light shadow over 2mm on the upper edge of the sheet.
Charming note from Maupassant from Etretat, thanking Vittorio Pica for a laudatory review, published in the Italian literary magazine Fantasio. Pica would devote several studies to Maupassant's masterworks in this magazine, including Mademoiselle Fifi, Pot-Bouille, Une Vie, and Bel-Ami.

"Monsieur et cher Confrère,
Zola me transmet votre aimable article du Fantasio. Il m'a fait le plus grand plaisir ; et je vous prie de recevoir, avec mes vifs remerciements, l'expression de mon confraternel dévouement et de toute ma sympathie".

An art critic of Neapolitan origin, Pica took an early interest in French naturalist and symbolist movements: "Curious about all avant-garde movements, he had first concerned himself with the naturalists - he maintained close relations with Maupassant, Huysmans and Zola -, then he became interested in the symbolists, particularly Mallarmé and Verlaine, to whom he devoted studies of admirable accuracy" (Petralia, Bibliographie de Rimbaud en Italie cit., p. 37). A contributor to the most prestigious national and international magazines of modernist tendency, he was one of the first founders of the Venice Biennale, of which he would be secretary general from 1920 to 1926.
Precious response from the writer with his distinctive signature, addressed to an admirer of his work.