A hundred erotic letters from the painter Gustave Courbet come to light

Besançon. The French painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) is known primarily for his paintings The origin of the world (1866), which aroused scandal by depicting a female sex, and now that reputation is reinforced with a hundred highly erotic letters that he sent over the years to a Parisian woman and that have just come to light.

The letters were buried among archives of a municipal library and will be the subject of an exhibition in Besançon (east).

The correspondence runs between November 1872 and April 1873 between Courbet and Mathilde Carly de Svazzema, a woman of high society in Paris who had been abandoned by her husband.

The painter sent her 25 letters and Mathilde replied with 91, until the relationship ran out without ever being physically consummated. Although from the tenor of the correspondence, they did not lack imagination: Dear P…, you know I would give I don’t know what right now to suck your c…, bite your golden hairs, your c… and devour your big pointed nippleswrites Courbet, before writing an even more daring fragment.

Mathilde is not far behind: I will have my c… ready to receive the sensations that you like to make me experiencehe answers.

Courbet was a realist painter, a supporter of the revolutionary Commune that burned Paris between 1870 and 1871.

When he began this epistolary relationship with the Parisian, he was depressed and ill, since the failure of the Commune dragged him into disgrace and he was frowned upon by the authorities.

They are the only known letters from Courbet with erotic content.highlights Henry Ferreira-Lopez, director of the municipal libraries of Besançon. In his opinion, the texts reveal a lot of sensitivity and (a) very modern conception of the relationships between men and women.

The texts were bequeathed to a public library approximately half a century ago. They remained hidden among the archives, until a year ago when a librarian, Agnès Barthelet, discovered them.