LOUŸS (Pierre). Autograph manuscripts and notes relating to the Corneille-Molière affair. [1919-1921]. 438 ff. on strong paper, generally oblong (16 x 21 cm), with 7 envelopes titled in Louÿs's hand: Proses écrites par Molière tout seul - Éducation de Corneille - Les Manifestes de Corneille - Cinna - Sertorius - Scudéry - Rhythme. A very important set of working notes by Pierre Louÿs, some of them unpublished, relating to the iconoclastic thesis that he was the first to defend, making Pierre Corneille the author of several plays attributed to Molière. This conviction, which occupied and obsessed Pierre Louÿs for years, is amply argued and detailed here, with quotations and chronological facts to back them up, in these many pages covered in the great handwriting of the end of his life. In August 1919, Louÿs published an article in L'Intermédiaire des chercheurs et des curieux entitled "Is Corneille the author of Amphitryon? In the months that followed, he wrote several articles trying to persuade the public and critics of the seriousness of his claims. In the spring of 1921, he told Thierry Sandre that his work on Corneille was ready for publication. Although this work never appeared in its finished form, important traces of it remain, some of which have yet to be exploited, as can be seen from this inestimable collection of manuscripts, a testament to the hard work and erudition of Pierre Louÿs. Some of these notes were published by Frédéric Lachèvre in Nouvelles glanes bibliographiques et littéraires, in 1933, and later in other works that revisited this inexhaustible controversy, from Henry Poulaille to Dominique Labbé. A third of these notes concern the literary quarrel unleashed by Louÿs in 1919 when he claimed that Amphitryon, Les Femmes savantes and Le Tartuffe belonged to Corneille: drafts of his replies and open letters, variations of his arguments, attacks on the bad faith of the Moliéristes, failings of historians and anthologists such as Paul Lacroix, Roger Le Brun, Eugène Rigal, Emile Faguet and Paul Desjardins (see the work by J.-P. Goujon and J.-P. Desjardins).P. Goujon and J.-J. Lefrère, Ôte-moi d'un doute. L'énigme Corneille-Molière, Fayard, 2006).