"j'ai les yeux de plus en plus malades [...] je vous fais envoyer Mont-Oriol"

Autograph letter signed by Guy de Maupassant, to the critic Vittorio Pica. 1 page ¼ in black ink on two pages of a bifolium with letterhead of his initials, "Sur le Bel-Ami / Antibes". Autograph envelope enclosed, bearing numerous stamps and postmarks.Discreet sepia ink offsetting on the first sheet, from another Maupassant letter.

 
Touching letter from Maupassant with failing eyesight, lamenting his inability to read the laudatory reviews by his correspondent Vittorio Pica. The latter published numerous studies in the Italian literary magazines Fantasio, Napoli Letteraria and La Tavola Rotonda on the writer's masterpieces, including Mademoiselle Fifi, Pot-Bouille, Une Vie, and Bel-Ami.

In 1887, Maupassant sails along the French Riviera. He feels the need for perpetual forward flight, delighting "in that blue of the South," he wrote in Bel-Ami, "which fills the heart with joy." This wandering is unfortunately marred by complications from his syphilis - his visual troubles, which had become a true ordeal for the writer:

"Mon cher ami,
Je ne vous ai pas écrit parce que j'ai les yeux de plus en plus malades et qu'il m'est interdit de m'en servir soit pour lire soit pour écrire. [...] (My dear friend, I have not written to you because my eyes are increasingly ill and I am forbidden to use them either for reading or writing. [...])
Mais comme je vois que vous supposez des causes inexpliquées à mon silence, j'ai voulu vous en dire moi-même la raison. Merci pour vos articles, mais je ne les ai pas lus et on ne me les a pas lus. Le dit secrétaire a dû s'épargner cette besogne. Je les fais chercher : et je vais me les faire traduire tout de suite. Voilà un des gros ennuis des yeux malades ; on ne me montre pas la moitié des choses. Je vous fais envoyer Mont-Oriol par le même courrier.
Excusez mon laconisme, mon cher Pica, et croyez à mes sentiments bien affectueux" (But as I see that you suppose unexplained causes for my silence, I wanted to tell you the reason myself. Thank you for your articles, but I have not read them and no one has read them to me. The said secretary must have spared himself this task. I am having them searched for: and I will have them translated to me immediately. There is one of the great annoyances of sick eyes; they don't show me half of things. I am having Mont-Oriol sent to you by the same post. Excuse my brevity, my dear Pica, and believe in my most affectionate sentiments).

An art critic of Neapolitan origin, Pica took early interest in French naturalist and symbolist movements: "Curious about all avant-garde movements, he had first concerned himself with the naturalists - he maintained regular contact with Maupassant, Huysmans and Zola -, then he became interested in the symbolists, especially 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.
An aesthetic letter from the writer, with letterhead from his boat, the Bel-Ami, a solid twenty-ton cutter with which he sailed the Mediterranean.