An absolutely astonishing discovery at the Besançon library. Erotic letters have been found in which we can read this type of sentence: “You know that I would give I don't know what right now to bite your golden hairs.” Words signed Gustave Courbet and missives that until then remained well hidden from view.
His brushes created The Origin of the World and his pen is none the wiser. In his fiery letters, Gustave Courbet, in love, moves from “my charming Mathilde” to cruder language. “He calls her my beloved whore.”reveals Henry Ferreira-Lopes, director of the municipal library of Besançon, who was able to read them. “He sometimes exposes his conception of art, he is looking for a woman who is both a lover and a muse“.
After The Origin of the World and upon the death of the artist, the Courbet family wanted to avoid a new scandal and gave this cumbersome burden to the Besançon library in making the curator swear never to communicate them. For a century, generations of librarians kept the secret.
“We mysteriously found, placed on a shelf, a pile of letters. There was a kind of slightly mysterious note on it. Lot of letters from a famous character from the 19th century. We were careful never to communicate them,” explains Henry Ferreira-Lopes. These libertine letters will be published by Gallimard next March.
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