two old letters are sitting next to each other on a white surface
ALDE

63 - CREVEL (René). Signed autograph letter to Alfred Rosset.
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Estimate €800 - €1,000
Sale commission
Description
CREVEL (René). Signed autograph letter to Alfred Rosset. Undated [Berlin, 30 January 1928]. 3½ pages in-4, on letterhead from a Berlin hotel, with a signed, stamped envelope. An important letter written from Berlin, where René Crevel had travelled in January 1928 to give a lecture and consult a Berlin specialist regarding his tuberculosis. There he met up with Gide, as he confides to his correspondent, a friend of Jouhandeau’s: (…) I got up very early to go and hear *Le Fils Prodigue*. Gide was attending the performance. Very Olympian. I’ve seen him a great deal. I admire him (the word ‘admire’ here means ‘his truth’), but I’ve left everyone behind to get on with my work… After mentioning Berlin, he confides: There is chaos, a provincial air, in this giant, clean city. People were kind to me (...) I made love, but I am still haunted by a dream too big for me, since I no longer wish to think of human beings and feel that, for me, a life in the ordinary, earthly sense has come to an end. Is it last year’s illness and having been so afraid of death, my constant companion for weeks on end? My poor friend, from the depths of my frivolities, my debauchery, I hear the voice telling me that I must do ‘something’. This is not a religious crisis, but perhaps the desire to build, with words that are still but stammering, a temple to the spirit. (…). The love whose face I had thought I had rediscovered—my fault here was to respond to it only with harshness. I am detaching myself from the world; I am detaching myself to the point of fear… A deeply moving text, strangely prescient of the author’s suicide a few years later in 1935.
See original version (French)
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About the sale Eros & Thanatos – Selected extracts from the L-D S library
Auction location
Auction time 10/07/2026 at 2:00 PM
Pictures credits:
ALDE
See original version (French)
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