BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (Jules) Lot n° 74

L.A.S. to Alfred Grévin. Paris, "Vendredi matin" [1881]. 3 pp. in-8. Red ink. Header engraved in red "Never more" repeated on the preserved envelope with postmarks and silk lakes. Important letter from Barbey to Grévin, violently opposed to his museum project. "You won't find me at your photographer's tomorrow, and here's why. The pleasure of receiving you in my home yesterday, and of making the acquaintance of a talented man whose manners pleased me immensely, made me welcome the project you told me about a little too quickly? I should have asked you to reflect on your proposal; but when you were gone I thought about what you had told me, I took four steps away from your idea to judge it, (as you would a painting) and what I saw in my reflection detached me completely from it. I don't know the Tussaud Museum, but I've seen Cabinets de Curtius [Philippe-Guillaume Mathé, known as Curtius, founded a famous wax cabinet under Louis XVI, in the Palais-Royal] a few times in my life, and I've always found them dreadful. The impression they made on me has come back, an ugly vision! And no matter how talented your museum is, it will always be a Curtius cabinet! It will always be crude art - frozen life, - trompe l'oeil that can never be fooled... These statues, with mechanical springs, dressed in real clothes, these colored wax casts, this life which is not the life we want, obtained by the most brutally material means and which is, in the final analysis, nothing but an odious & impotent antics of life, all this came back into my mind [...] you who were sympathetic to me right away, I had said "yes" to your project too quickly. If you had asked me for a portrait or a statue, it would have been different: it would have been art, in its high & true notion, but here art is not [...]". Letter published in Barbey d'Aurevilly, Correspondance générale (Belles-lettres, 1980) VIII, 1881/30, p. 290