"J'avais bien pensé que cette vieille bonne femme qui tape si fort sur les matelas, avait du écorcher mon nom."

Friendly autograph letter signed by Octave Mirbeau, addressed to the playwright and founder of the Revue Blanche, Alfred Natanson. 12 lines in black ink on a folded sheet, letterhead paper "Cormeilles-en-Vexin(S.&O.)", envelope included.
"Cher ami, J'avais bien pensé que cette vieille bonne femme qui tape si fort sur les matelas, avait du écorcher mon nom. Mais dans l'incertitude, car je pouvais penser aussi que vous étiez pris avec quelqu'un de très sérieux, [...]. Ceci mon cher Fred pour vous dire que je suis parti de chez vous, triste de ne pas vous avoir vu, voilà tout, et sans le moindre sentiment mauvais. Vous savez que j'ai pour vous une affection solide et je vous connais assez gentil pour moi, pour me permettre de supposer des sottises. [...]" ["Dear friend, I had indeed thought that this old good woman who beats the mattresses so hard, must have mangled my name. But in uncertainty, for I could also think that you were busy with someone very serious, [...]. This my dear Fred to tell you that I left your house, sad not to have seen you, that's all, and without the slightest bad feeling. You know that I have a solid affection for you and I know you well enough to be kind to me, to allow myself to suppose foolish things. [...]"]
With an amusing postscript: "Ne prêtez pas attention à ce gribouillage... L'auto a je ne sais pas quoi, j'y travaille.. et n'y fait rien de bon.. d'ailleurs.. Et mon mécanicien se prend la tête, à deux mains noires d'huile grasse [...]". ["Don't pay attention to this scribbling... The car has something wrong, I don't know what, I'm working on it.. and it's not doing any good.. anyway.. And my mechanic is holding his head in his two hands black with greasy oil [...]"].
Mirbeau was particularly close to the Revue Blanche group, since its launch in Paris in 1891. But it was from the Dreyfus affair that his intimate and lasting friendship with the Natanson brothers, Thadée, Alexandre and Alfred, was strengthened. After aesthetic disagreements about Art Nouveau and the Nabis, Mirbeau finally reunited with Thadée around 1900, in a now common inclination for the young Nabis painters of the Revue Blanche, Bonnard, Vallotton and Vuillard.
The Revue Blanche played an essential role in France, as confirmed by historian Paul-Henri Bourrelier: "Most of the most prominent writers, painters, musicians, politicians, intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th 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 classmates from the Condorcet lycée, La Revue blanche quickly became a place of debate on all subjects that stirred France. It led political battles under the impulse 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."