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Guy de MAUPASSANT

Lettre autographe signée à la Comtesse Potocka : "le vin, l'amour, et l'opium"

La Guillette (Etretat) s.d. [fin 1887], 9,8x15,5cm, une feuille.

Guy de Maupassant's autograph note to Countess Potocka, lines in black ink on one page. Published in Philippe Dahhan, Guy Maupassant and women: Essay , Bertout, 1996.
from Guy de Maupassant
addressed to the countess Potocka, rich worldly and intellectual aristocrat whose great beauty and fickle personality appear in filigree news and masterpieces novelistic of the author ( Mont-Oriol , Our Heart, Humble drama ).
Maupassant wrote to Emmanuela Pignatelli di Cergharia, wife of Count Nicholas Potocki, who occupied Avenue Friedland in Paris, a sumptuous hotel where she gathered a real court of sighers "died of love for her", nicknamed "Maccabees" by allusion to the seven brothers martyrs of the Bible. The composer Camille Saint-Saëns wrote him a mazurka, Guerlain created for her a perfume; his immortal charm was immortalized by the painter Léon Bonnat, and a young Marcel Proust will sign a chronicle of Le Figaro on his famous salon. She was the great conquest and muse of Maupassant, who never ceased to woo her until the end of her life.
The author gives to the countess
. Diagnosed with syphilis for about ten years, Maupassant was indeed particularly familiar with remedies and potions, frequent visitor of water towns and followed by many doctors before his internment at the clinic of Dr. Blanche, where he died of paralysis July 6, 1893. This humorous note addressed to Countess Potocka is one of the innumerable attempts at seduction made by Maupassant, an eternally upset lover: the writer offered him his manuscripts, wrote poems on fans, and went almost daily to his house. she during her stays in Paris. Their correspondence continued for many years, Maupassant having even created the "Anti-Soporific Anonymous Society for the perpetual recreation of Countess Potocka", for the sole purpose of distracting the countess and escaping his indifference: " Feeling therefore that my efforts often remain fruitless in the face of your willful indifference, I have sought in what way I could get rid of your boredom on every occasion. "(Letter of August, 1885, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York).
 

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