"C'est une joie délicieuse quand on a le cœur tourmenté, de savoir qu'on a des amis comme vous..."

Moving autograph letter signed by Octave Mirbeau, addressed to the playwright and founder of the Revue Blanche, Alfred Natanson. 15 lines in black ink on a folded sheet, mourning paper with black border, watermarked "JDL & cie", envelope attached.
"Thank you for your kind letter. I already knew from Alexandre [Natanson] how worried you had been about my wife's condition. It is a delicious joy when one's heart is tormented, to know that one has friends like you, like all of you, the good people of the Relai. Please tell your wife that mine was very touched by her friendship... And embrace everyone with effusion. Also tell Olga [Alexandre Natanson's wife] and Misia [Thadée's wife] that we love them tenderly, and Alexandre, that he is a charming friend."
Long postscript on the poor health of his wife, the former actress Alice Régnault: "Yesterday was not a good day, and the wound on her arm presented a nasty appearance. Today it is a little better. But it is something to watch very closely. Movements are made a little more easily but she still suffers extremely at night, at the slightest play of the muscles".
Mirbeau had been particularly close to the Revue Blanche group since its launch in Paris in 1891. But it was during the Dreyfus affair that his intimate and lasting friendship with the Natanson brothers, Thadée, Alexandre and Alfred, was strengthened. After aesthetic disagreements over Art Nouveau and the Nabis, Mirbeau finally reunited with Thadée around 1900, in a now shared inclination for the young Nabis painters of the Revue Blanche, Bonnard, Vallotton and Vuillard.
The "Relai" corresponds to a former coaching inn in Villeneuve-sur-Yonne purchased by Thadée Natanson in 1897 which became a destination for all their writer and artist friends. One could encounter the Nabis painters, Vuillard, Vallotton, Bonnard or Roussel as well as Toulouse-Lautrec.
The Revue Blanche played an essential role in France, as historian Paul-Henri Bourrelier confirms: "Most of the most prominent writers, painters, musicians, politicians, intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries collaborated with it or were associated with it. Created, financed and directed by the three Natanson brothers, young Polish Jews, with the enthusiastic complicity of their fellow students from the Condorcet lycée, La Revue blanche quickly became a place of debate on all the subjects that stirred France. It led political battles under the impetus of anarchists like Fénéon, Mirbeau; socialists, such as Blum, G. Moch, Péguy; Dreyfusards and founders of the League of Human Rights, like Reinach and Pressensé."