Georges COURTELINE (1858-1929). Autograph manuscript signed, L'Escalier; 4 pages and a half small in-4, some corrections. Complete manuscript of the second tale of the collection Les Fourneaux, published by Albin-Michel in 1905 (pp. 15-28). It is the story of an infernal couple, the narrator's uncle and aunt: "Between the walls of this house of Janot, the uncle and the aunt lived as cat and dog, animated one against the other of an instinctive antipathy that had slowly sharpened thirty-five years of tête-à-tête, the emptiness of a formidably stupid provincial existence and devoid of purpose. It was enough for one to express a way of thinking, for the other, in a hurry, to display a diametrically opposed way of seeing. [And so, from one side to the other, they exasperated each other; she, aggressive, bitter, surly; he, mocking, disdainful, strong for shrugs and insulting silences". To go down from their bedroom to the dining room, one had to take a dark and tortuous staircase at the end of a long dark corridor; the aunt decided one day to connect the two rooms by a spiral staircase, against the advice of the uncle, who stubbornly refused to take it. The uncle died as a result of a fall on his staircase, and the aunt obliged the morticians to take the deceased down the spiral staircase: "I told you you would go down it!" murmured this excellent woman.