VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM Auguste de (1838-1889). - Lot 248

Lot 248
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VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM Auguste de (1838-1889). - Lot 248
VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM Auguste de (1838-1889). autograph MANUSCRIT, Le Candidat by Gustave Flaubert; 2 oblong pages in-8 (paper a little creased with a few slight marginal cracks and a tear without missing, ink stains). Draft of an unpublished article on Le Candidat by Gustave . [Flaubert's play Le Candidat premiered on March 11, 1874, at the Vaudeville theater. Villiers devoted an article to it in the Revue du monde nouveau on April 1, 1874, very different from this one, which will be collected in 1890 in Chez les passants (Œuvres complètes, Pléiade, p. 459-463). This draft shows erasures and corrections]. "The drama, too impartial to be moral, would be an infamous work if we were not aware of this terrible truth, that fools are unforgivable in that they make us indulge the wicked. The skeptic is a man who is aware of having lost his way on earth. He is the only one who has the right to despair properly so called, and in whose mouth (even if he had five hundred thousand pounds of income) this word is not a disgusting, versatile and grotesque banality. [...] Because, either the human soul is nothing, (and, then, honor, love, and virtue are nothing) or it is something as positive as the body and then the wounded of the soul have right to as much consideration as those of the body, and they have right to be furious until death against the fools, who are their wounds. Only, the artistic misfortune of Flaubert, in the splendid turlupinade of this drama, The Candidate, is not to have raised the bitterness of the chalice that he makes the public drink, to the height of an appalling purgation: in a word, we point out the imperfection of his irony. Yes, we would have liked to see, in an admirable fifth act, (like the first four), the characters of this comedy sublimated and magnified without motive, as we have seen them, without motive, vile and monstrously stricken with daze. [...] The author, by putting his play in front of an audience of which this same play is the perfect and simple photograph, admits to be the victim of the same motive as his Candidate. But Flaubert is incapable of ridicule. Unfortunately. Without it, this great writer would be a true genius. [...] Flaubert has this terrible thing that he would make us love ridiculous people, if they were not cursed".
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