DUMAS ALEXANDRE: Fils (1824-1895) French author and playwright. The complete bound manuscript of Lettre a Paul Alexis, sixty-eight pages (written to the rectos only), folio, n.p., n.d. (c.1883), in French. The manuscript is written in an unidentified hand and was presumably dictated by Dumas fils, although has numerous corrections and deletions in his hand across many of the pages, and represents the author's response to an article that Paul Alexis, a member of the Groupe des Medan (along with Zola, Huysmans, Maupassant, Cerard and Hennique), had published in Reveil, defending himself from the attacks of the Ecole Naturaliste. Dumas fils states, in part, 'My dear child (I continue to call you my child, because the article that you devote to me proves to me that you are still young at the same time as it announces to me that I am already old, which I was beginning to suspect…..The newspaper, of which you are one of the editors, is willing to reprint my novel La Dame aux Camelias in serials, and you have devoted an article to me on this subject. It seems that my novel is decidedly not worth much; that's where you start, and it's far inferior to the masterpieces of Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola, and Daudet. Don't count on me to contradict you……Have we compared Corneille and Racine enough! Rossini and Meyerbeer! For Gluck and Puccini we went further, we fought. What remains of all these comparisons? Nothing. Corneille and Racine, Rossini and Meyerbeer are great minds in different guises. Gluck remained and Puccini disappeared. I am one of the Puccinis of the future…..' Bound in half Morocco midnight blue calfskin over marbled boards and with gilt title and decoration to the spine (some age wear and minor areas of loss, and the front board slightly detached from the spine) and with marbled endpapers. With the small circular stamp of the Victor Sanson collection to the front free endpaper, alongside several annotations, and formerly in the collection of Jules Claretie. Some light overall age wear, about VG

 

 

Paul Alexis (1847-1901) French novelist, dramatist and journalist, best remembered today as the friend and biographer of Emile Zola.