BAUDELAIRE Emile ZOLA / Signed Autograph Letter / Baudelaire Monument / 1893

  

Signed autograph letter "Emile Zola" [to Léon Deschamps] Paris, March 20, 1893, 1 p. Zola renounces writing a text to support the project of a monument in honor of Baudelaire.

"My dear colleague, I am so busy, so engrossed in other works [Zola was working on the final volume of the Rougon-Macquart series], that I could only send you the usual few banal lines about Baudelaire. And that would truly not be worthy of him or me. Moreover, should this tomb not be erected by poets alone? Prose would seem out of place, it seems to me.

Very cordially yours, Emile Zola." Léon Deschamps, founder of La Plume, launched a subscription in his magazine on August 1, 1892 for a statue in honor of Baudelaire. Zola was among the many writers and artists who responded favorably to this call. In a letter to Deschamps he wrote: "I can only be very proud to be part of the committee for a monument to Charles Baudelaire.

Sign me up and it is I who thank you." This short letter will be reprinted as is in Deschamps' newspaper fifteen days later, alongside other literary figures of the time.

Ferdinand Brunetière, defender of classicism and traditionalism, nevertheless vigorously opposed the project in a column published in La Revue des deux mondes on April 1. After several months of controversy, the project failed to materialize. Léon Deschamps had once again solicited the naturalist writer who, in this friendly response, declined the invitation to write a text to support the project, undermined by Brunetière and a few others.

Had he deemed his participation in the committee eight months earlier sufficient? He had not always been indulgent towards the poet, perhaps too close to reality to appreciate "the graceful Melancholies and noble Despairs that inhabit the supernatural regions of Poetry" (Baudelaire, "Théophile Gautier", L'Artiste, March 13, 1859). We remember the scathing article he wrote in Le Gaulois on January 10, 1869 p. 3: "I like to imagine him as a literary cenobite who has carved out a narrow niche in a hard rock and lived there alone, facing the hallucinations of his deranged brain. He was not a creator, and if his imagination soared in strange audacities, it was singularly unfruitful [...

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