Léon BLOY. Autograph manuscript signed, Preface, Bourg-la-Reine Pentecost 1912; 5 pages small in-4, mounted on tabs and bound in one volume of brown half-percaline (Laurenchet). Preface for the reissue of Le Désespéré by Crès (1913). He deplores to be considered as the author of the only Désespéré, in spite of his twenty other books, and to remain as "the pamphleteer of the Désespéré. [...] At the same time that I was slapping with a valid hand some puppets such as Paul Bourget, Caulle Mendès, Alphonse Daudet, Maupassant & a dozen others whose poor names do not exist anymore in any memory, it happened that, without even wanting it or knowing it, but slap fell on the multitude. This fact alone would be enough, I think, to show that the Desperate is not a pamphlet of occasion or of current events, but truly a social satire. [...] When I wrote Le Désespéré, more than a quarter of a century ago, I had the ambition to fix, in a lasting parable, the ignominy, marvelous then & now outdated, of the republic of letters" .... He attacks Huysmans, whom he believed to be his friend, and who was in fact "the first organizer of the conspiracy of silence of which I suffered more than twenty years & which cost the life of two small children who died of my misery". Then he briefly tells the story of the book and its editions, before delivering his book to "the new generation"...