Émile ZOLA. Autograph manuscript, [October 26, 1893]; 3pages in-8. Draft of speech to representatives of Russian literature and press. [On October 26, 1893, a banquet was offered to Russian sailors and a delegation of Russian writers and journalists]. In the name of the "Société des Gens de Lettres", he toasted "the Russian press, Russian literature [...] The spirit blows across frontiers, and it is the works of writers of genius, exchanged between peoples, which are the messengers of peace and the harbingers of solid alliances. [...] This great fraternal kiss between Russia and France [...] was prepared by years of mutual literary sympathy. French literature had sent its ambassadors, Balzac and Hugo, and Russian literature responded by sending us its own, Tourguénef, Dostoiewski and Tolstoï. They have moved hearts, brought minds closer together [...] the work must even be continued and expanded. Above the alliance between two peoples, there is the alliance between all peoples. This is undoubtedly a dream. [...] Why not hope in this great current of human goodness that is declaring itself, and why not entrust the cause to writers, to those powerful voices that fly from one nation to another, finding an echo in all souls, making all suffering humanity one family?"... He declares his own indebtedness to the Russian press: he was "welcomed by it and comforted in the difficult hours of my existence"... And he drinks "to universal literature, to the common fatherland!" Marcel Batilliat's booklet Éloge d'Émile Zola (1905), and a proof of another of Batilliat's speeches on Zola, are enclosed.