Lot n° 54
Estimation :
5000 - 7000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 8 680EUR
FLAUBERT Gustave (1821-1880).
5 L.A.S. "G. Flaubert" then "Gve Flaubert", [Rouen 1834-1841, to Ernest CHEVALIER in Les Andelys; 3 pages in-4 (edges creased), 3 pages in-8 (small hole by breaking of the seal), 3 pages in-8, 2 pages and a quarter in-4, and 2 pages and a half in-4, addresses.
Very beautiful youthful correspondence, often free, about his vocation as a writer, to his close friend.
[Ernest CHEVALIER (1820-1887), a fellow student of the young Flaubert at the College of Rouen, was his most intimate confidant, and the accomplice of his first literary attempts and of his fredaines.] [Rouen August 29, 1834]. He works "every day. I am making progress on my Roman d'Isabeau de Bavière, of which I have done twice as much since I returned from my trip to Pont-l'Évêque. You knew the story of the nun who had left the hospital. Well, the indiscreet put it in his newspaper [article published in L'Indiscret by Auguste Lireux]. But never was an article more stupid or more pitiful. First of all it is very badly written without verve or spirit, then three quarters of it is only a lie". And he quotes two verses of "our friend Victor Hugo": "For I have seen only pride, misery and sorrow/On this divine mirror that we call human face"... Then: "You think that I am bored with your absence, yes, you are not mistaken, and if I did not have in my head and at the end of my pen a Queen of France in the fifteenth century, I would be totally disgusted with life, and it would be a long time ago that a bullet would have delivered me from this buffoonish joke called life. [...] Your friend until death"...
September 26, 1837. "I am writing to you this evening, tired, exhausted and by candlelight, although I could postpone your letter until tomorrow, but now I am so dazed with work that I have no heart but to write to you. Imagine that since Friday morning I have been working 12 to 14 hours a day without a break, only to eat and smoke a pipe after lunch, today, as I had worked well, I smoked two (encouragement prize). I had taken notes for about a third of it when I realized that it would take me an immense amount of time, and I was forced to start my text without material, stopping in the middle of a period to stick my nose in a book to read a page of Latin, and as your friend the historian is not strong in Roman literature, it was not going fast - well, brand, I'll be finished tomorrow. ....
Wednesday 21 [August 1839]. "Would dear Ernest have held a grudge against me for the brevity of my last letter? I am sure that he is too good a fellow and that he does not think about it any more than he thinks about answering me, scoundrel that you are (I am abandoning the third person here), you cannot, however, allege your numerous occupations, for I believe that you have nothing to do but smoke and warm your balls in the sun. This is what I am doing now and what we will do even more wonderfully when we are together which will be shortly. I'm out of rhetoric class. In a year's time between the two of us, oh what dinners these gentlemen will have given each other, or rather, will have given each other, will have eaten, will have ingested, will have introduced themselves - what nopces and feasts, what 20-course salons, what pantagruelism! what a punch to say goodbye to the College. I must not complain, however, because the year of rhetoric spent under this divine father Magnus seemed to me rather short and if the other one seems only once longer I will be very happy. I am doing English by dint of it - I am reading the course of antiquities of Mr. de Caumont, some novels of the Great Voltaire (as says the boy philosopher atomistic materialist organic cynical molecules) and the Correspondence of the same individual which is well worth the collection of moral letters and the Tales to my sons of Mr. de Bouilly. My successes in rhetoric were limited to the 2nd access[it] of French speech and the 2nd p.[rix] of Hist[oire]. I did some pitiful compositions "....
Sunday 11 a.m. [April 18, 1841]. "Lunch is waiting for me/The mutton is ready/The steam is smoking/At one o'clock I leave for Trouville where I will stay for a week. On my return to Rouen I hope to find one of your letters - I have returned safely to my charming native town. Bonsecours was crowded with camels and their mahouts.
- You will know that your friend is such a nice man that he makes people jealous. I don't say jealous but jealous.
Monday 18 [October 1841]. "You already look at me as funny for not having written to you earlier. But you should not be surprised, because you know that I am proud, a vermin and a scoundrel. Secondly, as soon as I arrived from Trouville I had the gentlemen Hamard and Florimont; and I preferred to be alone with you to smoke more comfortably. Besides, it's cold, the fire is going to start again in my room and I now have a small box of Belgian cigars, a little opened it's true and which asks to be patrolled by you - I thus wait for you at the most
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