FLAUBERT Gustave (1821-1880). - Lot 65

Lot n° 65
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FLAUBERT Gustave (1821-1880). - Lot 65
FLAUBERT Gustave (1821-1880). L.A.S. "your G", Wednesday 11 a.m. [March 9, 1853], to Louise COLET; 7 and a half pages in-8 (small trace of rust on last page). Long letter of literary advice to his Muse for his poem The Acropolis of Athens. "I don't pretend to defend our corrections anyway, there must be in the great number many spots but the general spirit is good. Correct these corrections as far as the repetitions are concerned, but in their sense, as far as possible, as we have done ourselves with regard to your verses. [...] Do not describe the Propylaea. Think that one has already over the ears, of the architecture. Nobody will be grateful to you for such a scrupulous fidelity. Art is before archaeology and you have already so many columns! etc.! Passes boldly. It is necessary with all force that your small verses arrive after these two splendid - pr to cut of its hand/the blocks of Penthelic as hard as brass. Stop there, in the name of God! [...] Your Poem does not sin by the dryness do not be afraid. It is abundance on the contrary that can cause fatigue. - All these details "forming wings, serving as a vestibule" etc. are tedious. It is too didactic - and I always come back to that. One must infallibly stop at the quoted verses which I find sublime of stiffness & of neatness. [...] Adopt therefore our cuts; only if we have left repetitions correct them. There were some in the first piece (the hexameters of the beginning) that we did not have time to change"... Then he comes to the part of the poem on the Barbarians: "Let us speak now about the Barbarians it is serious. To do this piece completely well, it would have been necessary not to spare two classes of citizens to whom we are forbidden to touch 1° the priests 2° the academicians themselves. It is these two kinds of ferocious animals who, as far as the idea of Beauty (the ancient idea) is concerned, have done more harm than the Attila, & the Alaric. - We can therefore only render our Thought with countless softenings and an original attenuation, which weakens it by itself - & we must go to the goal & not to the goal. - Your piece was not good. it was even badly written, soft, too long, & said nothing about the other Barbarians (or too little)". Several remarks and corrections follow, referring in particular to the version redone by Flaubert and Bouilhet, before concluding: "This piece of the Barbarians seems to me on the whole very pompous, lyrical and gueulard. That is why I like it. [...] You can be sure that all our corrections have been carefully deliberated. - We had first spent the whole afternoon of Thursday on it. B. [Bouilhet] worked on it on Friday and Sunday. On Saturday and Sunday we went over it again and set to work in the evening. For me, it seems that I see it clearly. If we could have had the poem copied right away, I swear we would have sent it back to you clean. [...] Goodbye, good luck, a thousand caresses" .... Correspondence (Pléiade), t. II, p. 258.
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