Francis JAMMES (1868-1938). 2 L.A.S., 1897-1898, to Henri vandeputte; 2pages in-fol. and 3pages in-8. Fine literary letters to his friend Vandeputte, a young Belgian poet. July 1897. On his poem La Naissance du poète, published in the Belgian magazine Le Coq rouge: "I have received an anguished letter from the Gides. They shower me with laurels for my poem La Mort du poète which, if sad as death itself, is I think the most terribly beautiful thing I've done. It will probably complete the volume I intend to publish [De l'Angélus de l'aube à l'Angélus du soir]. As I wrote it, I felt death coursing through my veins. I was truly delirious. I was at once the poet, the author, the mother, the fiancée, the friend, the servant, the dog, etc., and when I finished it, I almost rebelled against Heaven, as if I'd really lived through this death. I don't know what happens to me when I write such things. It's frightening. And you, you know what deep rest your calm, fiery sentences give me. What an outpouring of truth, of youth, of poetry, emanates from your clumsy, rambling sentences, from your shocks, from the calm twirls of your fairground waltzes, under the dark oak grove where the day's farewell trembles. Souls like yours, like Rency's, seem to me partly made to calm hearts like mine that are agitated, perhaps too tragically, by the painful universe. Preferably my heart goes out to those, and if I put Lamartine on one of the himalayas of poetry, he never gave me the magnificent consolations and lessons in painful serenity of a Leconte de Lisle. For Leconte de Lisle is, whatever one may say, one of the most overflowing souls in poetry; but he wanted this overflow, which is being prepared between prodigious banks, to be a succession of equal cataracts. And this poetry is as wide as the Ganges or the Mississippi. So much the worse for those who see only a vain and learned music, in this ocean slick as deep as an organ song and inspired like him. You must like Erckmann? Here's another unknown! We leave him over there, I don't know where, in Lorraine, smoking two-cent pipes and doubting himself. Come on! It's appalling. He's a prodigious genius. It's simplicity incarnate in Goodness. What's all this Verlaine, all Dumas Fils, compared to Contes des bords du Rhin and Ami Fritz? You're of his race, like that divine des Ombiaux. Say hello to him. I'm telling you, this Erckmann is immortal. Now I don't care to talk literature. [...1 Best wishes to all those good Belgians who give me so much sympathy. I feel it well, there is in you, in them, the most sublime thing: the love of truth with the absence of jealousy"... March 1898. Jammes warmly congratulates Vandeputte: "What delicious bird sings in these graceful poems like virgin teenagers with big hats under the lilacs? You are a poet. You are, as a poor man is poor, as snow is white; there are cries of azure spun by gullets of gray birds of dawn cherries"... Jammes is grateful to Vandeputte, Ruyters and Rency for having been "among those who began to shout in my favor, and to shake the 'column of silence' where the impotent or the morons who are afraid of my oak leaves held me"... Former André Bertaut collection (December 14, 1983, n°164).