MAUPASSANT Autographed Letter Signed by Countess Potocka 1884

  

MAUPASSANT Guy de - Autographed letter signed to Countess Potocka: "Tell me, Madam, do you want a fetish? Autographed letter signed to Countess Potocka: "Tell me, Madam, do you want a fetish?

[early January 1884], 10.2x13 cm, 4 pages on a double sheet. Autographed letter signed by Guy de Maupassant to Countess Potocka, 67 lines in black ink on letterhead paper "GM 83, rue Du­long", envelope included. Published in Marlo Johnston, "Unpublished letters from Maupassant to Countess Potocka", Histoires littéraires, n°40, October-November-December 2009.

This long missive begins with a commission that was given to Maupassant: "I am immediately fulfilling a commission with which I am charged for you, although I seem to detect a bit of irony in it. Princess Ouroussow, who has just written to me asking me to come see her tonight, asks me, in a postscript, to remind you of her when I see you.

" Princess Ouroussow was the wife of the Russian ambassador in Paris. With the Countess, she was part of the high society that surrounded authors and artists. The irony mentioned is this: "As reputed perceptive people have affirmed that the entire thought of a woman's letter is in the postscript, ... I wanted to immediately fulfill my role as an intermediary." He deduced from this addition "that the letter from the princess, despite what it contains that is kind for me, was addressed to you." This astonishing letter then discusses a little-known inclination of Maupassant: his taste for fetishes. He informs his correspondent that: "The hand, since it returned from your place, seems to me in an extraordinary agitation." This is the famous hand that Maupassant had bought from George Powell.

It was through the poet Charles Swinburne (whom Maupassant almost saved from drowning) that the two men met in Étretat in 1868. Powell and Swinburne shared a house there, filled with Powell's collection of curiosities. The hand in question was mummified and it inspired Maupassant twice. The Hand of the Strangled Man.

This nervousness of the lucky charm leads Maupassant to ask himself: "Perhaps you were wrong not to keep it as a fetish?" He adds: "But I have other singular fetishes." In fact, he has a collection: "I have the shoe of a little Chinese girl who died of love for a Frenchman.

" He comments on the potential effects of these objects: "This talisman brings luck to the desires of the heart. I also have a large ugly copper cross that apparently worked miracles in the village where I found it." But not all of these talismans work as they should: "Since it has been with me, it no longer does. Perhaps it is the environment that bothers it.

" However, this is not the most surprising: "But what I possess that is most singular are the two extremities of a man deceived by his wife and died of grief. The guilty wife kept the foot and the horn of this husband... And had them welded together. I do not know what the effect of this object might be.

" Despite the seriousness of the matter, Maupassant does not lose his sense of humor: "Tell me, Madam, do you want a fetish? I add that my friends claim that I bring luck myself! I lay at your feet this last lucky charm that requests preference.

" To echo his statement regarding female postscripts, he adds two to his letter. In the first one, he asks Countess Potocka to remind him to Mrs. This lady was the wife of Eugène Lambert, a painter known for his cats and who frequented the same circle as Maupassant and the countess. The second one is much more delightful: "One should not attach the same importance to the postscripts of men as to those of women.