LOUŸS (Pierre). Correspondence with his brother Georges Louis. 1887-1917. Important collection of 154 autograph letters occupying more than 500 pp. preserved in six thematic black percaline slipcases titled: Confessions sur sa vie personnelle - Confidences sur sa vie amoureuse - Échanges sur sa vie littéraire - Considérations sur la vie politique française - Wagner et l'Allemagne - Relations fraternelles. - Confessions on his personal life". 1890-1916. 31 letters forming 99 pp. This set includes a long and very beautiful letter from Louÿs to his brother Georges, dated 16 April 1890 (11 pp. 1/2), in which the twenty-year-old aspiring writer delivers a kind of personal literary manifesto, first narrated in the form of a dialogue with the editor of La Vérité d'Épernay. He aspired to anonymity and pseudonyms, and intended to limit his audience to a small number of friends. He declared: "The public goes for rubbish, but it likes morals too: it won't get them from me; I'll be quietly immoral and carefree so as not to be successful on either side. He likes clarity: I'll be obscure. He likes panache: I'll be focused. He likes false humility, à la Hugo: I'll be proud, à la Baudelaire...". And, further on: "Write! To write! Live to write. Remove from life anything that does not passionately tend towards the Ideal...". This box contains almost all of Louÿs's correspondence with his brother Georges for the year 1912, probably one of the worst of his life, a year of accumulating difficulties for him. On 21 June he wrote to him: "When everything breaks down around me, it takes away all my energy". On 18 July, he wrote: "Everything around me is disappearing, people, hopes and the taste of life. Louise's state of health was the subject of several letters. In a letter of 1897, he mentions the Dreyfus Affair; a letter of 1914 concerns the sale of his library and part of Georges' library; another, in April 1916, the return of the desire to write: "I have broken with bibliophobia". - Confidences sur sa vie amoureuse. 1897-1911. 11 letters forming 63 pp. This file contains a very rare and interesting collection of letters from Pierre Louÿs on his relationship with his Algerian mistress Zohra bent Brahim, whom he met in Algiers in March 1897 and welcomed into his home on boulevard Malesherbes from May to December 1897. Here is an unpublished letter of 19 April 1897: "A month ago, then three weeks ago, I sent you some photos you haven't told me about: five little Kodaks of Dahlia [i.e. Zohra in code]...". - "I've done everything I can to leave Zohra, I can't. I've fallen out with her eight times [...] I've told her: I don't want to take you away. It's no use..." - You're worried about Zohra. Others are too. Five people have said to me here: "Dear friend, I'm going to do you a great favour. Don't get involved with her; she's the worst kind of woman." But they haven't read L'Andalouse. I'm going to do what my novel hero did. I'll take her away..." A long, unfinished, partially coded letter, dated 22 March 1897: "Arrive in Cannes without warning; drop Dahlia [Zohra] off at a remote hotel and officially go down to the Royal Hôtel where Henri is. That way I would have two rooms and I think I could prevent anyone from finding out which one I am spending the night in. - Yesterday I had a violent quarrel for an hour with Dahlia [...] alas! I am no longer young enough to ignore the charm of reconciliations. [...] She is always very curious...". He reproduces an amusing exchange between the young Algerian woman, "dressed like a Moor", and a passer-by who wanted to photograph her. "And she has eyes! I'll show them to you". A long, unpublished letter dated 21 August 1897, recalling a stay in Étretat and his relationship with Zohra: "I took Z. back the very day after our falling out and I literally snatched her away from a Zouaves captain...". - Z. is leaving me in two months, so you can rest easy. I'll miss her, poor little thing, but I certainly won't keep her. Two letters from 1911 mention Marie de Regnier, of whom we have enclosed three famous photographic portraits in modern print. - Exchanges on her literary life". 1890-1917. 39 letters forming 144 pp. In these letters Louÿs talks about his literary friendships with Gide and Valéry, Bilitis, Aphrodite and La Femme et le Pantin, the "mysterious book" he mentions on 6 April 1894. In 1897, he worked on the second edition of Bilitis, of which he wrote on 27 October: "If I were rich, I wouldn't publish it for another ten years and I'd be working on it all the time". On 5 March: "I followed your advice about Bilitis. I've written six new songs and... four old ones, all new and unpublished. 16 November: "I was fading on the proofs of Bilitis. Every time I publish, I get the feeling that it could be better. On 22 December, after the book had been published: "Until now, lesbians have been portrayed as femmes fatales... This is the first time an idyll has been written on this subject...". On 11 May 1898, he spoke of his literary and artistic friends: Regnier, Laurens, Heredia, Mallarmé, Debussy, etc. In September 1903: "A copy of La Femme et le Pantin sold yesterday at Drouot for 2310 fr". An important letter, dated 20 July 1904, deals with the failure of his marriage to Louise; in it he also notes: "I abhor the literature of this century. I like neither the books of my colleagues nor my own...". He wrote about Hugo, Moreri, Du Bellay, Proust, Montesquieu, Lamartine, Michelet, Oscar Wilde - whom he received on 16 February 1917 with Valéry, Debussy, Tristan Bernard and others - but also quoted Plato, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Banville, etc. - Considerations on French political life". 1896-1912. 27 letters for 81 pp. Most of this collection concerns France's international policy, which his half-brother Georges Louis, who held high diplomatic positions during his career, wrote about. He was appointed commissioner for Egyptian debt in Cairo in 1893, became director of political affairs at the Quai d'Orsay in 1904, then ambassador to St Petersburg; he was dismissed by Poincaré for his pacifism in 1913, four years before his death. His brother's letters cover the main political events of the time: the Russian alliance, the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus affair, Fachoda, the Moroccan crisis of 1904, the Agadir affair in 1911, the Balkan crisis, the First World War, etc. - Wagner and Germany". 1908-1917. 4 letters forming 25 pp. Important dossier on Pierre Louÿs's relationship with Wagner's music, of which he was an ardent supporter and one of the first French writers to understand the ambition. It includes three long and interesting letters to his brother Georges dated 2, 3 and 4 March 1917. The letter of 2 March reads: "Wagner, a profound Germanophile, has unwittingly put his German homeland on trial in the Tetralogy" - "a trial of rare clairvoyance, since in it we find at once (1) the formidable power that was not prophesied in 1851, (2) deceit at every source of that power, (3) the same motley alloy of cunning and bravery, valour and baseness". On 3 March, he gave a new psychological interpretation of this drama: "The whole subject of the Valkyrie is in Acts II and III; the drama takes place in Wotan's mind: - As a just God, he must punish Siegm[und]and Siegl[inde]. - As a human God, he wants to forgive them...". He draws an interesting parallel between the Wagnerian cycle and the current world war: "Everything in the Ring recalls the history of that war! - You can't even write Nothung without thinking of 1914. In the letter of 4 March, he considers that "the anti-Wagner campaign of 1915 has become ridiculous through the fault of those who started it. - Saint-Saëns wrote in such a spirit of theatrical competition...". He refers to Bizet's Carmen, "a French musical drama", of which he quotes the last two lines, which he says are "on a par with anything", and which "Nietzsche quoted... to accuse Wagner and said that Wagner had found nothing like it. - Yes, he did. - And more than once. [...] But whose Carmen is it? Which parts belong to Mérimée? to Meilhac? to Halévy? to Bizet? Bizet? Further on, on Wagner and Germany: just as "no, with all the Corsicans, we wouldn't make Napoleon", "W[agner] is not the result of his race". Finally, in an earlier letter to Georges Louis in December 1908, he mentions Homer, Heine, Goethe, Wagner, Hugo, etc., and writes in particular: "At the moment when their imagination is obviously prodigious (Heine, Wagner, Hugo) [...], what inspires them beyond all human emotions is the image of a woman weeping over their bodies...". (He also mentions his incomplete Marot of 1537 "passed to the sale Lignerolles in 1894"). - Brotherly relations". 1887-1916. 42 letters (including 3 pneumatic ones) totalling 101 pp. Pierre and Georges Louis corresponded constantly, sometimes exchanging several letters a day wherever they were, until Georges' death in 1917. Half-brothers, they were twenty-three years apart when, in 1879, Pierre's mother died suddenly and Georges took on the role of guardian to the nine-year-old Pierre. Although this set opens with a letter dated 31 December 1887 and ends with another dated 1916, it contains 25 letters dated 1912 alone. Five letters in this set - dated respectively 22 August 1890, s.d. [1894?] and 31 May, 24 September and 11 October 1912 - were not published by Jean-Paul Goujon in Mille lettres inédites de Pierre Louÿs à Georges Louis (Fayard, 2002). Attached to these six slipcases is an important set of 40 poems, letters and autograph documents by Pierre Louÿs, consisting of : - 10 early poems: Tristesse. [1888-1889]. Autograph sonnet. 1 p. in-4, with an autograph quatrain on verso. The first quatrain is different from the version published in Œuvres complètes, t. XIII, p. 23, dated October 1889. - First Sextine. 12 April 90, midnight. Autograph poem of 39 verses. 2 pp. in-4 (Œ.C., t. XIII, pp. 42-43). - I carved it out of an ivory trunk... [1889-1890]. Autograph poem of 32 lines. 2 pp. in-4 (Œ.C., vol. XIII, pp. 38-39). - La Senteur des bras. Ended 14 January 91. Autograph sonnet. 1 p. in-4. The first quatrain of this erotic blazon ("La sueur qui vient sourdre où ton coude se plisse...") is different from the version published in 1938 in La Femme. - La double tunique en mollesse... Bayreuth, 10 August 1891. Autograph sonnet. 1 p. in-12 in pencil. - She bathes with the image of the forests... 7 Feb (n.d.). Autograph poem. 1 p. in-4 on blue paper, no. II at the head; autograph corrections. This is an early version of the poem La Nuit from the cycle La Forêt des Nymphes (Œ. C., t. XIII, p. 149). - For the stele of Leconte de Lisle. [1894]. 1 p. in-4 wide. Carefully copied, probably by Charles Moulié, Louÿs's secretary. An autograph version of this sonnet appears in Louise de Heredia's Album amicorum (BnF, Ms-14363). Œ. C., vol. XIII, p. 157. - To the muse of P. V. [Paul Valéry]. "Muse who forever gave birth to a poem...". Autograph poem in eight alexandrines and eight hexasyllables. - Epithalam for cousin Aimée. Autograph sonnet. 1 p. in-12. - Voisine de table. Autograph poem. 1 p. in-8. - Autograph pieces and documents: a column published when André Lebey's collection Préludes tristes appeared, published in 1894 under the pseudonym André Yebel and dedicated to Pierre Louÿs; an aphorism dated 12 April 1911; a series of oblong autograph worksheets on Une loi capitale en histoire littéraire, N. Lemercier's Panhypocrisiade, Jules Laforgue, etc.; an IOU. - Autograph letters from Pierre Louÿs, addressed to his secretary Thierry Sandre (Charles Moulié) in 1914, to Sarah Bernhardt in 1920, to Claude Farrère in 1910, to Judith Gautier in 1893, two letters to André Lebey and three to José Maria de Heredia; others to various correspondents, in which Louÿs evokes Bilitis, Aphrodite, La Femme et le Pantin, etc. Also in this collection is a beautiful and important letter from Pierre Louÿs to his friend Claude Debussy concerning their unfinished project for a Christmas story, Cendrelune: l.a.s. dated Friday 2am n.d. [1895], 4 pp. in-12: 'My dear Claude, I did nothing all evening and spent all my time brooding over Cendrelune. - Do you know that it's very bad? and that it won't interest anyone? [...] I think it could be made into a book. But there's no way of putting it on stage in 1895. It would seem pedantic, pointless and boring. [...] It seems to me that if you want to do something other than Pelléas, we should take a well-known theme, which I would rejuvenate as best I could and which wouldn't confuse people. (My idea from the back of my head would be to do a Faust, but you probably wouldn't want to). Do you want a Psyché, the most dramatic and charming tale there is? Ariane would be too great an opera; but there are others...". There is also a correspondence of six letters exchanged between the actress Musidora and Pierre Louÿs in 1915-1916, including four l.a.s. with envelopes and a card a.s. from Musidora to Louÿs and a l.a.s. from Louÿs to Musidora. Musidora (1889-1957), who was Louÿs's friend and mistress, remains famous for the roles she played in two of Louis Feuillade's series: Irma Vep in Les Vampires in 1915 and Diana Monti in Judex in 1916. Also enclosed are 13 letters and autographs addressed to Pierre Louÿs by P.-A. Laurens, J.-É. Blanche, Willy, Henry Bataille, Stuart Merill and others, an autograph poem by Hugues Delorme entitled Ballade du verger de Pierre Louÿs, etc.