PAUL HERVIEU letters & handwritten signed cards

  
Four handwritten autograph letters & 4 handwritten autograph cards by Paul Hervieu, as well as two handwritten autograph letters by Mme de Pierrebourg, one handwritten autograph letter by Mme Béart de Bézert, and one handwritten autograph letter by Emile Fabre. At his home in the. He is a novelist and. Coming from a bourgeois family, he initially aimed for the bar, became a lawyer, and briefly mingled in political circles. In 1881, he obtained a position as an embassy attaché in Mexico, which he did not hold for long.

Primarily interested in literature, he devoted himself mainly to writing while attending literary and social salons, such as those of Madame de Pierrebourg, who was his mistress, and Madame Émile Straus. There he mingled with writers like Marcel Proust, aristocrats such as Princess Mathilde and Prince Georges Bibesco, actors like Réjane, and artists like Edgar Degas. In 1883, he began his long friendship with Octave Mirbeau, becoming his confidant. That year, he collaborated under the pseudonym Liris in the ephemeral magazine founded by his new friend, which also featured contributions from Alfred Capus. A satirical weekly and an anti-opportunistic, but also anti-Semitic, publication, intended according to Mirbeau “to make grimace all these false worlds of unpunished brigands of finance.

” However, like Mirbeau, who would become one of the most engaged Dreyfus intellectuals, Hervieu would be a Dreyfusard, which would lead to a failure in his first academic candidacy. He co-founded with Gustave de Malherbe the publishing house La Librairie moderne.

Concerned about the social issues of his time, he presented them in psychological and social novels, in the manner of Paul Bourget, and in plays, often moralizing. Wanting to rigorously analyze a situation and show its inevitable consequences, he staged characters who acted with extreme logic, devoid of any humanity, solely attentive to the feeling of duty and social conventions. This rigidity leads to dramatic outcomes that seem exaggerated today.

The plot unfolds in aristocratic or social circles: the adulterous woman in L'Énigme, and in Le Réveil, the remarriage of a divorced woman in Le Dédale, and the care owed to children, regardless of the consequences, in La Course du flambeau. “I do not believe he ever has a word of pity for the physical or moral suffering he depicts with unyielding vigor.

It is solely through the intensity of his descriptions or analyses that he betrays his emotion and provokes ours. He was as he was in his books, so he was also in his life.” Paul Hervieu, storyteller, moralist, and playwright. He succeeded in 1900 to seat 12 of the Académie française.

He said of him: “Little Hervieu has a curious voice; it is like the distant voice of a sleepwalker that his sleeper would make speak.” He is buried in the Passy cemetery (Paris) next to his companion Mme de Pierrebourg, in literature Claude Ferval.