Solitude, political torments and intimate fantasies: a hundred erotic letters exchanged between the painter Gustave Courbet and a sulphurous Parisian emerge from limbo in Besançon, discovered in the attic of a library.
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) already had a sulphurous reputation for having been the author in 1866 of “The Origin of the World”, a realistic painting of a female genitalia exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay. But his missives are not to be put into everyone’s hands either.
“About 40 or 50 years ago, someone gave the curator of a public library some scabrous letters decorated with drawings, written to a lady by a famous personality of the 19th century.” On November 15, 2023, Agnès Barthelet’s eye fell by chance on these few words, placed on a National Assembly letterhead which topped a pile of old handwritten letters, in the dusty attic of the National Assembly Library. study and conservation of Besançon.
“This neat little pile piqued my curiosity,” the librarian remembers with emotion.
“When we started to look through the pile, we said to ourselves ‘Hey, there’s a certain Gustave’, then we saw an envelope addressed to Mr. Gustave Courbet… There, everyone reacted differently. Me, I I think I was a little paralyzed, I didn’t expect that,” confides the curator of the place, Pierre-Emmanuel Guilleray.
Their discovery: a complete correspondence exchanged from November 1872 to April 1873 between Courbet and Mathilde Carly de Svazzema, a lady of good Parisian society, unhappy and abandoned by her husband. Twenty-five are in the hand of Gustave, 91 by Mathilde.
– “Secret” –
“Dear Putain (…), you know that I would give I don’t know what at the moment to suck your c…, bite your golden hairs, your mound and devour your large pointed nipples”, writes Courbet, before a passage even hotter.
Mathilde is not left out. “I will have my c… all ready to receive the sensations you want to make it experience,” she replies.
At that time, the painter was in Ornans, his hometown located 15 km from Besançon, and she was in Paris.
These letters were probably entrusted around 1905 to the library by the heirs of Dr. Blondon, Courbet’s executor, who never married and whose only son died young.
Instructions had been given not to make them public due to their sulfurous nature. The secret was passed from curator to curator, until it was forgotten.
“These are the only referenced and known letters from Courbet with erotic content,” underlines Henry Ferreira-Lopez, director of the municipal libraries of Besançon. We read there “a lot of sensitivity and (his) very modern conception of relationships between men and women”, according to him.
For the mayor of Besançon, Anne Vignot, more than a century after the letters were written, the time for secrecy is over.
“These letters have been missing for 135 years. It was impossible for us to keep such a discovery secret,” which provides “an intimate and fascinating insight into Courbet’s psychology at this complicated period of his life.”
– Disillusioned –
The painter was a disillusioned man at this time. Just released after being imprisoned for his role during the Paris Commune, he is threatened with having to restore the Vendôme column at his own expense. He feels old, sick, without a future, even if his public success continues.
His epistolary encounter with Mathilde allows him to glimpse a possible rebirth and to express at the same time his doubts, his hopes and his conception of an accomplished sentimental and sexual life.
But after five months of torrid exchanges, feeling abused by his sweetheart, the champion of realism will interrupt the relationship. The lovers will never meet physically.
For fear of being imprisoned again, Courbet left Franche-Comté for good for Switzerland in July 1873.
The municipality is organizing from March 21 to September 21, 2025, at the Municipal Library of Besançon, the exhibition “Courbet, the hidden letters. Story of a found treasure”.
