Gustave FLAUBERT (1821-1880). L.A., [Croisset]... - Lot 145 - Ader

Lot 145
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6000 - 8000 EUR
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Result : 8 320EUR
Gustave FLAUBERT (1821-1880). L.A., [Croisset]... - Lot 145 - Ader
Gustave FLAUBERT (1821-1880). L.A., [Croisset] Thursday evening - 11 am. [August 13, 1846], to Louise Colet; 4 pages in-4 (dated "August 8, 1846" by L. Colet; split in the fold). Very beautiful love letter. ... "What I want from you I do not know. But what I want is to love you - to love you a thousand times more. Oh if you could read my heart you would see the place where I have put you! Flaubert is afraid that Louise will believe him to be selfish... "I am like everyone else, less perhaps than many - more perhaps than others. Who knows? [...] Who is not selfish... From the idiot who would not give a penny to redeem the human race to the one who throws himself under the ice to save a stranger. Do we not all seek, according to our various instincts, the satisfaction of our nature? St. Vincent de Paul obeyed an appetite for charity, as Caligula obeyed an appetite for cruelty. Each one enjoys in his own way and for himself alone - some by reflecting the action on themselves, by making it the cause, the center and the goal, others by inviting the whole world to the feast of their soul. Therein lies the difference between the prodigal and the miserly. The first take pleasure in giving, the others in keeping. As for ordinary egoism as we understand it, although it is disgusting to my mind, I confess that if I could buy it I would give anything to have it. Being stupid, selfish, and having good health are the three conditions for happiness. But if you lack the first, all is lost. There is also another happiness - yes there is another - I have seen it - you have made me feel it. You have shown me its illuminated reflections in the air, I have seen the bottom of its floating garment shimmering in my eyes. Here I am reaching out to grasp it... and you yourself are beginning to shake your head and to doubt whether it is not a vision [...] it seems to me that you too - you have sadness in your heart - and of this deepness which comes from nothing and which, holding to the very substance of existence, is all the greater, the more this one is stirred. I had warned you about it. My misery is contagious. I have the scabies! Woe to whoever touches me"... And Flaubert fantasizes about a mitten... "It seems to me that I am still smelling your shoulder and the soft heat of your naked arm. Come on! Here are the ideas of voluptuousness and caresses which take me back. My heart leaps at your thought. I covet all your being. I evoke your memory so that it satisfies this need which cries in the bottom of my entrails "... He sees again the boudoir of Louise... "I see again the pallor of your serious head when you stood in my lap... and the lamp! He has a bottle of Mississippi water: "I will pour it on your chest to give you the baptism of my love"... He sees Louise again "in the studio standing posing with the day lighting you from the side - when I looked at you - you looked at me too. And then in the evening at the hotel, I see you, lying on my bed, your hair spread on my pillow, your eyes raised to heaven, pale, your hands clasped, sending me crazy words. When you are dressed you are fresh as a bouquet. In my arms I find you with a warm softness that softens and intoxicates. [...] What a poor lover I am! - Do you know that what happened to me with you, never happened to me. (I was so broken for three days and tense like the string of a cello). If I had been a man who valued my person very much I would have been bitterly offended. I was for you. I feared from you some odious assumptions for you. Others perhaps would have thought I was outraging them, they would have judged me cold, disgusted or worn out. I was grateful to you for this spontaneous intelligence which was not surprised by anything when I was surprised by that as an unheard of monstrosity. So I had to love you - and very much so - because I felt the opposite of what I had felt when I met all the others, no matter which ones. - You want to make a pagan of me, you do, oh my Muse - you who have Roman blood in your blood. - But however much I excite myself by imagination and by bias... I have in the bottom of my soul the fog of the North which I breathed at my birth. I carry in me the melancholy of the barbarian races, with its instincts of migrations and its inborn disgust of the life which made them leave their country as to leave themselves. They loved the sun, all the barbarians who came to die in Italy, they had a frantic aspiration towards the light, towards the blue sky, towards some warm and sonorous existence, they dreamed of happy days full of love, juicy for their hearts like the ripe vine that one presses with the hands. I always had a tender sympathy for them as for their ancestors. Didn't I find in their noisy history all my peaceful unknown history. The shouts of joy of Alaric entering Rome, had for parallel, fourteen centuries later, the same
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