HUMBOLDT, Alexander von.
Autograph letter signed ‘Humboldt’, to an unnamed female recipient.
[Paris,] ‘Ce samedi’, [no month or year but not after 1827].
12mo bifolium (126 x 102 mm), pp. [3]; paper watermarked ‘J DE F’; sometime folded, slightly foxed and soiled, paper guard along central fold where evidently once tipped into an album.
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Autograph letter signed ‘Humboldt’, to an unnamed female recipient.
An excellent, intimate and unpublished letter in which Humboldt excuses himself for his reclusiveness, explaining that he had been tormented by pleurisy all winter.
Furthermore, the indisposition of ‘mon plus intime ami’ François Arago and the writing with which he had imprudently encumbered himself had enforced ‘cet excès de privations’. He goes on to write that he had read and re-read with the greatest satisfaction a ‘Discours’ which his unnamed correspondent had written: ‘C’est un morceau admirable de dialectique, de netteté dans les idées, de noblesse et de vivacité dans l’expression’. Since he mustn’t receive her as a ‘noble quêteuse’ on the fifteenth floor (an exaggeration) of his ‘demeure ancienne’, Humboldt suggests visiting her on Wednesday, ‘et avant mercredi soir’. He ends by mentioning that he hadn’t assisted at the lecture of ‘Mr de Rémuzat dont je honore le beau talent et l’individualité du caractère’; Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat had corresponded with Humboldt about the publication of his elder brother Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Lettre à Monsieur Abel-Rémusat (1827).
Provenance: at the head of the first page is written, in a near-contemporary English hand, ‘Baron Alexr. Von Humboldt Illustrious Traveller, and natural Philosopher’, and, in the same hand at the foot of the third page, ‘given C. M. H. by the Mse. Dolomieux 1827’. The latter is perhaps Christine-Zoë de Tuillière-Montjoye, Marquise de Dolomieu (1779–1849).
