Marguerite dite Lodoïska LOUVET DE COUVRAY... - Lot 559 - Rossini

Lot 559
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Marguerite dite Lodoïska LOUVET DE COUVRAY... - Lot 559 - Rossini
Marguerite dite Lodoïska LOUVET DE COUVRAY (1760-1827) wife of the writer and conventionalist. autograph manuscript, [September 1797, dated at the end of the 1st supplement (September 17)]; 28 pages in-4. Important manuscript on the life and work of her husband, written before his attempted poisoning to join Louvet in the grave. This notice is punctuated with personal reflections and outbursts of the deepest sorrow, and addressed to Honoré-Jean RIOUFFE (1764-1813), politician and man of letters, friend of the Girondins, author of an Oraison funèbre de J.-B. Louvet pronounced on October 26, 1797 at the Cercle constitutionnel. At the head of the book is this recommendation "to Riouffe": "These notes are very badly in order and very badly written. I invite you however to preserve them because I would never have the force to start again them. It took the feeling of a great duty to fulfill to give me the ability to do so. You did not feel how cruel this work was. No doubt many things are forgotten; but it is impossible for me to write more"... "Riouffe, it is a very painful duty to look back on the early years of my dear Louvet. The details are so heartbreaking that I begged him never to talk to me about them. They hurt me. So there is much I do not know. If you ever want to collect interesting notes, go to Couvrai, which is 7 or 8 leagues from Paris, where you will find his foster sister who adored him and to whom he was sent every year. What I know is that he was taken from his home between the ages of three and four. Soon he fell ill from grief at having left his nursery and his foster sister. They were obliged to send him back to Couvrai; he would have died"... She speaks of his mother, who adored him, of his father, who beat him, of his brother, who persecuted him; of his education and of his real blossoming, as an apprentice of the bookseller-papelier Brunet; of his first loves and of his beginnings in literature... She devotes several pages to his character: "Fearless and gentle, severe for himself, indulgent for the others, thrifty and generous. He was always the friend of those whose lover he had been, he loved me ten years before the revolution as he has since loved the republic. This one was my rival, but I cannot say that it was preferred. [...] He would have died for me as he died for her"... As for his "political life. - It is so linked with our loves... that this work is painful! She recalls Louvet's beginnings in his Section, and a speech to the Jacobins in favor of war that linked him quite with Vergniaud, Godet, Roland, Brissot, etc. She tells of his beautiful conduct on August 10, a moment when she threw herself on him to protect him ("Riouffe, what a death for me! Do you concoct Riouffe, a sweeter life than a death like this one?")... Then follows the relation of the exile in Switzerland, the reinstatement to the Convention, the persecutions of the royalists, the indifference of the patriots, the illness that was undermining him; and she gives free rein to her sorrow, invoking Louvet, their modest projects of a life of literature and walks, and says her project of "joining him": "Alas, I still exist and since 15 days he is no more! "She invites Riouffe to go to Nemours, where a witness of their love lives, then gives instructions for the distribution of their goods, and entrusts Duval with the execution of her last will... She ends by debating between her will to die and the duty to live, for her son: "When I see Felix at 16 years old, the living image of his father, it will not console me. [...] There remains what I owe to Felix. Enough to live on until he is strong enough to earn a living, an education so that his physical and moral faculties can develop. I leave him more than enough to live on all his life, more than we ever expected for both of us. I am more than even with him"...
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