Gustave FLAUBERT supports his friend for the Academy of Sciences.

Gustave Flaubert (1821.1880)

Autograph letter signed to Marcellin Berthelot. 

One page in-8° on blue paper.

Fine restoration on the left margin.

The writer supports Berthelot in his process of accession to the Academy of Sciences.

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" My dear friend. I take care of you. Tell me which members of the Academy of Sciences you are not sure about. Attached are the two bottles I spoke to you about. All yours. Gve ^Flaubert . »

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Following this, two lines in Marcellin Berthelot's handwriting, undoubtedly the result of the chemical analysis of the two bottles addressed by Flaubert: “Mineral soap. Ferruginous alumina hydrate, mixed with a few sea salt crystals. »

The learned chemist and politician Marcellin Berthelot (1827-1907), already a member of the Academy of Medicine, was campaigning to join the Academy of Sciences: he was elected there in 1873, later becoming its permanent secretary.

Gustave Flaubert, who was in contact with many scientists, supported his approach – the thing being all the more comical if we think of what he declared twenty years earlier to Louise Colet: “An Academy is all that There is the most antipathetic in the world to the very constitution of the Spirit which has neither rule, nor law, nor uniform. »

The letter is unpublished by the Correspondence of La Pléiade.