Lettre autographe signée et enveloppe adressée à la Comtesse Potocka : « Et cela, madame, n'est pas de la pose, en prose. »

Guy de Maupassant
Signed autograph letter and envelope addressed to the Countess Potocka: "And that, madame, is not of the pose, in prose. "
Sl [Paris] sd [12 February 1886], 9.8x 15.5cm, 5 pages on 3 sheets.
Funny and moving letter both literary and amorous.
Maupassant, at Antibes on the occasion of a marriage, addressed an astonishing letter to the Countess Potocka. She is at the same time her friend and a woman whom he courtiers by taste or worldliness. For her part, she quickly incorporated him into his group of "Maccabees," a circle of suitors over whom she reigned as an absolute mistress.
He grew up with Potocka for his kindness towards a new one recently published, Mademoiselle Perle : "I have been a long time, Madame, without writing to you because you have revolted me - literally - by congratulating me on Mademoiselle Perle , I am sure. He feels perfectly entitled to criticize his work: " I have the right to be severe given the author's name ..."
He suspects the Countess's male entourage to influence his judgment: " Certainly you have been influenced by the considerable and incompetent men whom you honor with your confidence for having thus appreciated this news worthy of a Mointhyon prize (I do not even know Not how one writes Montyon) as much by the form as the bottom. Maupassant resumed his previous procedure: he was at a distance from a group of which he was a part. It is also the salons of the Countess, it does not differ in any way from the " considerable men " whom he cites. The Montyon prize, which he claims he can not spell, is a literary reward for works "most useful to manners".
He confesses, however, a few lines later: " I wanted to prove that everyone confuses literature with Virtue - whereas they have nothing in common. "A business that can be called moral. But Maupassant's morality yielded to the writing: " Well, after this disloyal essay I opt for literature . "
Mademoiselle Perle was published barely a month earlier, on January 16, 1886 in Le Figaro . In spite of everything, he launched himself into a lapidary and funny criticism of his text, without failing to scratch his correspondent on the passage: " How could you judge with sympathy the story as banal as unlikely of this family of imbeciles living Behind the Observatory as at the bottom of the province - (Like it's new ) [...] Oh! Oh ! Oh ! Ah! Ah! Ah! What an ingenious fable! And the revelation takes place in a charming way, about a cake of kings! One weeps in a chalk, which is a comic on, and the other grateful, falls to the ground like a scarf, which is of a certain effect! He seems to find no grace in his work, in spite of his success: " Certainly the invention of this fabliau at Berquin is of a certain platitude, the observation of a perfect inaccuracy, the development of a tender naivete which Has touched everybody. For I have received many letters. "
What mattered success, for according to Maupassant, the danger is quite different: " I say that in writing such virtuous sweets without finds of any kind, without an artist's composition and even without a feathered address one arrives perhaps ... 'academy. But that's all, and not enough. He apologizes for the difficulty: " This is how I am cranky in my solitude where life is not gay. I work ; I work a lot ; My eyes ache, my stomach ache, my back pain; And my heart beats day and night. He reproaches his correspondent for the ways in which she uses him, as well as with his other followers of the group of "Maccabees." He thinks "... very often, with a certain sadness to a woman of whom I would really like to be, sincerely the friend, but whose kindness towards me is so variable that the friendship with her has a dancer's balance on The tightrope. "
But he avenged himself a few lines later, evoking his visits to his friends Marie Kann and Mme Legrand (Marie-Clothilde Legrand, Countess of Fournès) and then his friend the painter Henri Gervex: " that Mme Legrand wears Duke Duke of Prince In Prince, is becoming, with the aid of his hostess who thinks him delighted, a regicide communard, although he has been made to pass in this world for a practicing Catholic. Finally, after his some humorous features, he resumes his somber attitude, markedly aggravated during his last years, which he still has to live: " I do not go out, only in black and I am so bored, at the sole thought of everything What I could do to amuse myself, that I have not even the courage to move. "