SAND (Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, known as George). - Lot 202

SAND (Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, known as George). Born in Paris. 1804-1876. Novelist. L.A.S. "George Sand" to Ernest FEYDEAU. Nohant, January 30, 1857. 2 pages in-8, with her initials embossed. BEAUTIFUL LETTER IN WHICH GEORGE SAND SUPPORTS ERNEST FEYDEAUGeorge Sand responds to the three articles Feydeau had just published in La Presse "Lettres sur la crémation". The novelist herself had devoted an article the previous year to the question of cremation of corpses (also published in La Presse, October 25, 1856): ...I thank you very much for having quoted me sympathetically and set me right in my error. I thank you above all for having argued the question so well, and I hope that, despite the little hope you have of interesting the eternally ungrateful public, you will leave in it a stronger trace of this than all those who tried before you... She regrets...that work of another nature, which takes up all my time, would have prevented me from pursuing this crusade; but I'm delighted now, since Mr Bonneau [Editor at La Presse, who had written on the same subject] has come to break even more spears, and then you, even better spears. Indeed, you've said it all on this subject, and the plea is complete. You've said the last word, and the most striking is the inevitable necessity, more or less soon, of a profane, hideous translation. I didn't know all that, and now, thanks to you, I'm much more of my own opinion than I already was... After presenting her compliments, she invites him to address her plea...If you publish it in pamphlet form, as I am far from Paris and most of the time I don't know when my own works will appear, I ask you to think of me and send me a copy... Flattered by George Sand's letter, Ernest Feydeau replied on February 2, in the most friendly terms. The son of a Napoleonic officer, ERNEST-AIMÉ FEYDEAU [1821-1873], made a name for himself in literature in 1858 with the publication of Fanny, a popular novel that met with widespread success against a backdrop of scandal, and ensured its author some posterity. But what makes Ernest Feydeau even more interesting to us is his membership of GUSTAVE FLAUBERT's close group of friends: THÉOPHILE GAUTIER, the GONCOURT BROTHERS, who mention him several times in their Diary, and GEORGE SAND, with whom he had numerous epistolary exchanges. Remarried in second marriage to Léocadie Bogaslawa Zelewska, niece of the vicomte de Calonne, he was the father of the famous vaudevillist GEORGES FEYDEAU.