émile Zola - Autograph Calling Card Signed

Émile ZOLA (1840-1902), autograph business card signed.

Paris [C.1880-1881] - Mourning business card (Émile Zola lost his mother, Émilie Aubert, on October 17, 1880). Card rubbed, creases and wear to margins.

Size: 5.8 x 9.5 cm - With magnetized Plexiglas presentation frame (included): 10 x 15 cm

Moving card from Émile Zola responding to a voluntary subscriber for the future monument in tribute to Balzac for which Zola struggled for many years.

In addition to Nana published in 1880, Émile Zola published in 1881, Au Bonheur des Dames in prepublication (to be released in volume in 1883).

Thank you for Balzac, monsieur; But, helas! no subscription is open and you'll have to wait to send in your offering.

Émile Zola

The first to launch the idea of a monument to Balzac was Alexandre Dumas, immediately after Balzac's death. The abandoned project was revived by Zola in an article in Le Figaro on December 6, 1880, entitled Une statue pour Balzac. Zola explicitly called for a monument to Balzac to be erected at last, and for a committee to be set up. It was in 1885, again at the instigation of Émile Zola, then president of La Société des gens de lettre, that a monument to Balzac was commissioned from the sculptor Henri Chapu, who did not have time to complete the work: he died in 1891. The project called for a three-meter-high statue, to be delivered in 1893. Zola commissioned Rodin to take over the project, however, due to a succession of aesthetic controversies, political crises and institutional conflicts, the official inauguration of the monument on the boulevard Raspail median on July 1, 1939 took place more than fifty years after Rodin's commission, and twenty years after the latter's death.

Appended is a reproduction of a famous cartoon by Gill published in 1878 showing Émile Zola, the Rougon-Macquart under his arm, paying homage to a statue of Balzac as the latter responds to the salute of his worthy heir.