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Gustave Flaubert

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:2,000.00 - 4,000.00 USD
Gustave Flaubert

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Auction Date:2020 Apr 08 @ 18:00 (UTC-5 : EST/CDT)
Location:15th Floor WeWork, Boston, Massachusetts, 02108, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
ALS in French, signed “Gu. Flaubert,” two pages, 5 x 8, no date. Letter to a friend, in full (translated): "Le Sexe Faible [The Weak Sex] must have been taken to the censors today. Weinschenk worries about the minister, but if you cut the word minister, the role no longer exists and the piece becomes incomprehensible. The general can be a Swiss general (Swiss—oh, very well!), but minister cannot be modified…you have to take it or leave it. Write your father what you think is appropriate. You know the question as well as I do. Your interest is at stake more than mine. If your father and Beauplan support us (and they can support us, since the censors depend only on them and on any one thing that they say about it), we are saved. If they don’t, then not. In a last-ditch effort I am writing one more time to d’Osmoy! And I will notify R. Duval to speak to his cousin Chabaud-Latour. More I cannot do. I know perfectly well that Weinschenk counts on a big monetary success. Le Sexe Faible is his last challenge, and he will do anything I want. But still, if the minister is left out, good night! I am not trying to conceal that I am full of bitterness and that I am getting to the point where I have had enough, or even too much! It probably would not be bad if you did the trip to Paris, (Sunday). It's worth it. As for the rest, it’s up to you. I suspect your father will not answer you, an easy way to avoid difficult steps, and that Le Sexe Faible will be stopped by the censorship, but they will regret it." In very good to fine condition, with professional repairs and backing to the second page.

Le Sexe Faible, or The Weaker Sex, was a dramatic comedy originally written by Louis Boulihet, a playwright and one of Flaubert’s closest friends who died in 1869. After discovering the incomplete manuscript amongst Bouilhet’s papers, Flaubert opted to finish The Weaker Sex—that being men—as a tribute to his late friend in 1872-73, doing so somewhat rapidly as he was also under pressure to produce his own 1874 work, The Candidate, which turned out to be a resounding flop. Flaubert was no stranger to the looming threat of censorship; his masterwork debut novel Madame Bovary was attacked by public prosecutors for obscenity following its serialization in 1856, with Flaubert’s inevitable acquittal the following year adding greatly to the work’s notoriety and subsequent book sales. In a letter addressed to George Sand on September 5, 1873, Flaubert remarks: ‘As I have in the le Sexe faible a rather ridiculous general, I am not without forebodings. What a fine thing is Censorship! Axiom: All governments curse literature, power does not like another power.’