Jules BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (1808-1889) Autograph... Lot 16

Jules BARBEY D'AUREVILLY (1808-1889) Autograph manuscript in brown ink and pencil (draft with many erasures and corrections). 1 p. in-folio, numbered "2". [1877]. End of an article (p. 2) on HEINE and AUBRYET, "these epicureans who feel pain too much to deny it". He considers Heine as "the greatest poet that Europe has had since Byron". "The other is a poetic spirit - as close to poetry as one can be, when one is separated from it only by that thin wall of a crystal so divine [...]. And both of them, in the books in which they speak of their suffering with a delightful yet cruel expression, do not think for a minute of posing as resistance fighters of moral strength and heroic will. In these books, perfumed with pain, they are what they have been all their lives [...]". Article published in Le Constitutionnel of December 31, 1877, reprinted in Le XIXe, choice of text by Jacques Petit (Mercure de France 1966, T. II, p. 286) and in Barbey d'Aurevilly, OEuvre critique (T. IV, p. 793).