Hidden, found and soon exposed… The tumultuous history of Gustave Courbet’s erotic letters

A treasure classified as Part of it will be exhibited from March 2025. Story of a burning soap opera.

Chot in front! The firebox was placed on a shelf, in full view of everyone. In November 2023, while four curators from the Besançon study and conservation library went up to the establishment's attic to work on documents, a stack of letters placed on a shelf at eye level, without envelope or link, attracts their attention. Firstly, the letter which covers the pile, headed by the National Assembly. A short text explains that it is “scabrous letters written to a lady by a famous personality of the 19th century”.

As soon as the first sheets were turned, the librarians came across, astounded, the name of one of the two letter writers: “Monsieur Courbet”, which quickly transformed into a familiar “Gustave”, then into little names more and more spicy than the two. whispered on the paper in the absence of the pillow. Librarians have just discovered, intact and well arranged, one hundred and sixteen erotic letters exchanged between the famous painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and a certain Mathilde Carly de Svazzema (1839-?) – that is, twenty-five of one and four -twenty-one on the other – between February 1872 and May 1873.

It was she who took the initiative to write to the master to tell him all of her admiration, and more if there were affinities. Adventurer, “fashionable men’s roller” as they said at the time, Mathilde Carly de Svazzema was in the 19th century what the “grazers”, that is to say people baiting the naive online, are today. The two correspondents do not know each other, have never seen each other and will never see each other. The answers of the painter, who left Paris for his native Franche-Comté because of his troubles with the government, are unequivocal.

A colorful prose

“It quickly takes an erotic turn, at the initiative of Courbet,” explains Pierre Emmanuel Guilleray, discoverer, with three colleagues, of this X-rated treasure which tells, not a love story, but a game of erotic attraction, between naivety, desire and comfort. Gustave Courbet at this time was a famous but exhausted man. He has just been released from prison and is wrongly accused of his participation in the destruction of the Vendôme column during the Commune. In Paris, his property is about to be seized. In Ornans, Courbet still responds to orders, works like a madman, but is already very ill. Obese, he suffers from dropsy and worries about being alone.

So, as a lover of good food that he remains, he writes and warms his senses. « […] dear Whore, think about it, you know that I adore you, you know that I do unjust things to please you; you know that I would give I don't know what right now to suck your cunt, bite your golden hairs, your mound and devour your large pointed nipples, unload in your mouth, kiss your protruding belly, caress your sides lovingly with my tongue, introduce it if I could into your other little cunt between your beautiful buttocks, what do I know!! » he wrote on February 8, 1873. And the beauty replied: “I will have my c… all ready to receive the sensations you want to make it experience. »

We can easily imagine that the director of the Besançon library, to whom the bundle of letters was undoubtedly entrusted at the beginning of the 20th century by a descendant of Dr. Blondon, friend and executor of Courbet's will, could only immediately classify it as hell, this secret cabinet reserved for the sulfurous volumes of any self-respecting library. Hidden in a real cupboard, that of successive directors, put up in the attic in the 1950s and whose contents had been placed on the shelves where it was found, the correspondence has survived a century and a half protected from dust and censorship.

An extraordinary discovery but not entirely surprising, Courbet's colorful prose sheds light on another facet of the man who was always considered an ogre living life to excess. “We find the same enormity as that present in his paintings, but on the side of sex”, explains Laurence Madeline, director of museums in the city of Besançon. An exhibition at the city's Museum of Fine Arts, showcasing the works alongside the letters, was considered for a time before abandoning it. We could have understood how the artist, insatiable, seizes the words of this virtual relationship as he paints with both hands the flesh of his sleeping beauties of the Sleep (1866) or the pinkish thighs of the mythical Origin of the world (1866).

Classified, numbered, scanned, the letters have been studied from every angle since they came to light a year ago. Next March, the Besançon library will offer an exhibition revealing selected pieces that should not be put in front of everyone. At the same time, Gallimard editions will publish the entirety of this torrid correspondence. We will see first-hand how the artist knows how to do without the usual epistolary courtesies to get directly to the heart of the matter. In May 1873, Courbet, naive but not too naive, ended his exchanges with his partner who was not afraid: she had copied all his letters and threatened to blackmail him. She will be arrested for blackmail and pimping. Two months later, he went into exile in Switzerland where he continued his correspondence even more, this time with family and friends. He died there in 1877.

“Courbet, the hidden letters. Story of a found treasure”, from March 21 to September 21, 2025 at the Besançon library (25). Such. : 03 81 87 81 40.
Correspondence Gustave Courbet – Mathilde Carly de Svazzema, ed. Gallimard (to be published in March 2025).
Courbet's correspondence, text established by Petra Ten-Doesschate Chu, ed. Flammarion (1996).