"je voudrais pouvoir chanter en votre honneur un bel épithalame. Le malheur est que je ne suis pas poète."

Friendly autograph letter signed by Octave Mirbeau, addressed to the playwright and founder of the Revue Blanche, Alfred Natanson, some time after his marriage. 12 lines in black ink on a folded sheet, mourning paper with black border, watermarked "JDL & cie", envelope included.
"Je vous envoie, à votre femme et à vous, tous nos vœux affectueux, et je voudrais pouvoir chanter en votre honneur un bel épithalame. Le malheur est que je ne suis pas poète. Mais nous somme vos amis et nous vous embrassons de tout notre cœur. Nous avions espéré que vous viendriez passer quelques jours à Cannes et nous nous faisions une fête de vous avoir ici. Misia nous dit que vous avez renoncé à ce voyage. Comme c'est ennuyeux ! [...]". ["I send to your wife and to you, all our affectionate wishes, and I would like to be able to sing a beautiful epithalamium in your honor. The misfortune is that I am not a poet. But we are your friends and we embrace you with all our heart. We had hoped that you would come to spend a few days in Cannes and we were looking forward to having you here. Misia tells us that you have given up this trip. How annoying! [...]"].
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."