"la seule pensée d'écrire dix lignes me torture [...] Je veux aller voir Naples"

Autograph letter signed by Guy de Maupassant to critic Vittorio Pica. 1¼ pages in black ink on two pages of a bifolium, with his manuscript heading "Cannes. Villa mon plaisir". Accompanying autograph envelope, with a lack due to opening.
Discrete sepia ink offsetting on the first leaf, from another Maupassant letter.
Charming letter from Maupassant with failing eyesight, announcing his journey to Italy, which he would make the following month in the company of painter Henri Gerveix and Henri Amix.
He addresses this letter and his short story Yvette to Neapolitan literary critic Vittorio Pica, who published numerous studies in Italian literary reviews Fantasio, Napoli Letteraria and La Tavola Rotonda on the writer's masterpieces, including Mademoiselle Fifi, Pot-Bouille, Une Vie, and Bel-Ami.
Overwhelmed by visual troubles, Maupassant felt the need for perpetual forward flight, and made his grand tour of the Côte d'Azur and Mediterranean in the 1880s, of which he would publish his impressions in the form of chronicles.

"Mon cher Confrère,
Excusez si je ne vous écris jamais, mais j'ai les yeux si malades que la seule pensée d'écrire dix lignes me torture.
J'ai l'intention d'ailleurs de faire plus, et d'aller vous serrer la main dans le courant d'avril. Je veux aller voir Naples, et descendre jusqu'à la Sicile. Je serai heureux de vous dire toute la reconnaissance que je vous ai pour votre si cordiale confraternité.
Je me demande si vous avez reçu Yvette [souligné plusieurs fois]. Dans tous les cas j'en ai encore un exemplaire ici, je vous l'adresse en le recommandant car les employés des Postes sont plus que suspects. [...]"

The month following this letter, Maupassant would traverse with his companions the Ligurian Riviera, Savona, Genoa, then Venice then Naples and its gulf: "Naples et ses habitants indisciplinés le séduisent davantage. Le désordre et la saleté de la ville l'amusent. Il félicite le laxisme avec lequel ce peuple du soleil appréhende la vie" (Cosimo Campa, Maupassant).
We do not know if he would finally shake hands with his Neapolitan correspondent, Vittorio Pica. The latter was interested very early in French naturalist and symbolist movements: "Curieux de tous les mouvements d'avant-garde, il s'était d'abord occupé des naturalistes - il a entretenu des rapports suivis avec Maupassant, Huysmans et Zola -, ensuite il s'intéressa aux symbolistes, à Mallarmé et à Verlaine surtout, auxquels il a consacré des études d'une justesse admirable" (Petralia, Bibliographie de Rimbaud en Italie cit., p. 37). Collaborator of the most prestigious national and international reviews 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.
Aesthetic letter from the wandering writer to a great admirer of his works.