Émile ZOLA works on the monument in homage to Honoré de BALZAC.

Émile ZOLA (1840.1902)

Autographed and signed business card.

One page in-16° (5.8 x 9.5 cm) bordered in black. Crease mark in the left margin.

[Paris. 1880-1881]

Document framed between two panes of glass.

A moving postcard from Émile Zola responding to a volunteer subscriber for the future monument in homage to Balzac, for which Zola worked tirelessly for many years.

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Thank you for Balzac, sir;

But, alas! no subscription is open and you must wait to send your offering.

Émile Zola.

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Alexandre Dumas was the first to propose the idea of ​​a monument to Balzac immediately after the writer's death. The abandoned project was revived by Émile Zola in an article in Le Figaro on December 6, 1880, entitled " A Statue for Balzac." Zola explicitly demanded that a monument finally be erected to the master and called for the formation of a committee. It was in 1885, again through the intervention of Zola, then president of the Société des Gens de Lettres (Society of Men of Letters), that a monument was commissioned from the sculptor Henri Chapu, who would not have time to complete his work: he died in 1891.

The project called for a statue three meters high, 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 median strip of Boulevard Raspail on July 1,¹⁹³⁹ took place more than fifty years after the commission given to Rodin, and twenty years after the latter's death.

Zola's business card is bordered in black, in mourning for his mother, Emilie Aubert, who died on October 17, 1880.