Gustave Courbet’s erotic correspondence discovered in an attic, a secret hidden for 150 years

Between 1872 and 1873, Gustave Courbet and Mathilde Carly exchanged 116 letters with erotic-pornographic content. Discovered in the attic of the Besançon library (Doubs), this unpublished correspondence will soon be exhibited.

The pile of papers lay in the middle of worthless archives, in the attic of the library of Besançon (Doubs). In November 2023, a librarian came across it by chance. The letters are not signed. But she quickly understands the magnitude of her discovery.

She holds in her hands the secret correspondence of Gustave Courbet and Mathilde Carly de Svazzena, a letter-writing mistress whom the painter ended up having condemned. 116 missives, written in the space of only five months and whose vocabulary, to say the least explicit, would take any eye out of its socket.

91 letters from Mathilde, 25 from Courbet. Known exchanges, but long considered lost. Why were documents of such value put in the attic? Were they so shocking that we wanted to make them forget?

This is what the Besançon Study and Conservation Library assumes. Its employees spent six months transcribing the letters and retracing their itinerary. According to research, the erotic correspondence had been bequeathed to the executor of Gustave Courbet’s will, after the artist’s death in 1877. Before dying in turn, in 1906, this man then sent them to the library bisontine.

Then, mystery until the 1950s, when a curator of the time (who does not mention his name) dusted off this treasure. We know this because he left a note on top of the pile of letters, in which he explains that he (we also do not know who) asked him not to publish them. Leaving the pile of paper abandoned for a few more decades.

“This secret has been kept by three generations of conservatives. And the last one did not transmit the secret to his successor”comments the director of municipal libraries and archives Henry Ferreira Lopes. “They made sure that we were not informed, on purpose, for fear of scandal”. In question, surely: the content of the letters and the nature of this connection, long considered dishonorable by the painter’s descendants.

Correspondence begins in the summer of 1872. Mathilde Carly de Svazzena writes first. Born in 1839 in Orléans, married to an Englishman, she is described as “an adventurer” by Thierry Savatier. “She was readily presented as a fashionable man-chaser”writes the Courbet specialist again in his work “The Origin of the World”.

She explains to the painter that she saw him and admired him during the Paris Commune, this insurrectional movement of the spring of 1871. He does not remember her. But the two begin an exchange which quickly shifts to sexual matters.

“You know I would give anything right now to suck your cunt, bite your golden hairs, your mound and devour your big pointed nipples, unload in your mouth (…)”says the painter in one of his missives.

You would have to believe willingly or unwillingly in all my tenderness for you. And if I held you I would fuck you until it hurts.

Letter from Gustave to Mathilde

Advances to which Mathilde Carly de Svazzena outbids: “I will have my cunt ready to receive whatever sensations you please to make it experience.”.

All this correspondence was not secret. Some of the letters written by Mathilde to Gustave have already been published. But these letters had been written at the end of their relationship and did not contain any erotic flight.

This discovery once again reveals, this time, the missives written by Courbet. And if the painter’s letters are usually expensive on the market, these are all the more precious because they reveal a more intimate side of the painter and the man.

Juliette [Courbet] took care to eliminate anything that could have harmed his brother’s memory. We knew the scandalous part of the man but these testimonies had disappeared. Today, we have an objectification of what we suspected but which we did not have the means to prove.

For Courbet specialist Frédérique Thomas Maurin, these letters should nevertheless not lead us to see the artist as “rough and brutal”. On the contrary, according to her, they prove “his modern vision of sexuality” since “he writes several times that giving pleasure to his sexual partner is what matters most to him”.

Especially since these writings are not only erotic. Mathilde Carly de Svazzena also talks about a life that she describes as unhappy. On several occasions, Courbet demonstrates “tenderness” and details his torments.

The painter is fragile at this time. Ordered to repay the Vendôme column after a stint in prison, he sought exile. At almost 60 years old, Courbet does not despair of finding a life partner, whom he seems to be looking for in Mathilde, in his letters.

“Courbet always sought a complete union of a woman who was at once a muse, a lover and a confidante”confirm Henry Ferreira Lopes. “You can feel it in these letters”which according to him show “a great sensitivity behind the gritty”.

What a disappointment for the Ornanese, therefore, to understand that Mathilde intends to deceive him. In order to raise funds, the artist allegedly sent her paintings for her to sell, but did not see the money returned.

Understanding that Mathilde wants his money, to the point of calling him “this filthy woman” in a letter to a relative, Courbet brought Mathilde to Besançon in July 1973. She was condemned there and imprisoned for some time for fraud before the painter went into exile in Switzerland, where he died four years later.

You have to wait 50 years before publishing private archives. Gustave Courbet died in 1877. The Besançon library considered that this correspondence was no longer likely to dishonor the painter.

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36 of these 116 letters will therefore be exhibited between March 21 and September 21, 2025 and put online on the site https://memoirevive.besancon.fr/, following this exhibition. The entire correspondence will be published in a collection co-published with Gallimard.

Written with Stéphanie Bourgeot and Florence Petit.