FEYDEAU Ernest. Autograph letter signed to... - Lot 111 - Audap & Associés

FEYDEAU Ernest. Autograph letter signed to Gustave Flaubert. Trouville, September 12, 1867; 6 pages in-4. LONG FRIENDLY LETTER TO FLAUBERT. He begins by dismantling in detail a financial operation with the Northern railways in which their friend Frédéric could gain 30,000 frs. or lose 60,000, explanations which seem to be useful to Flaubert in the process of conceiving L'Éducation sentimentale. Then he complains violently about the censorship that Michel Lévy had practised, without his knowledge, on his last book, Le roman d'une jeune mariée, under the pretext that it contained passages hostile to the Jews and that he himself nourished "odious prejudices against a portion of the great human family", whereas in a similar case, Michel Lévy justifies himself, "several writers and even members of the Institute had not hesitated to remove from their books anything that might offend Israelite susceptibility". He then comes to the "making" of his new novel, La comtesse de Chablis ou Les Moeurs du jour, on which he gathers material and in which he will say "EVERYTHING he thinks about the world, life, governments and religion". The novel was first published in La Liberté and then by M. Lévy in 1868. It is about George (Sand) and the Goncourts who can "give him the most malicious information". He builds up a collection of fossil shells that Cuvier might have envied him