Max JACOB remembers his friendship with VAN DONGEN.

Max JACOB (1876.1944)

Autograph letter signed to his friend Kees Van Dongen.

A page in-4°. Autograph envelope.

Presbytery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire. July 5, 1921.

“I write prose and verse and […] I follow the services which are in pure Gregorian chant. »

Moving letter from Max Jacob who, having just retired to the presbytery of St Benoît, far from the artistic hustle and bustle of Paris, remembers, with nostalgia, his old Montmartre friendship with the Fauvist painter.

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“ Dear old man. I am very far away. THANKS ! my dear friend, thank you for thinking of me, morally far from Paris. I work like a workhorse. The party will be very nice and I regret a little to be deprived of it; I regret a little, very little. There are too many parties in my life and too little work. I'm catching up at the moment.

I am in a garden between a presbytery which resembles the Trianon cottage and a basilica in the open field, which is considered the most beautiful Romanesque church in France. I do not care. I write prose and verse and as there is a pilgrimage here, I follow the services which are in pure Gregorian chant, and the processions .

My compliments to your wife and you, this old friendship that you know goes back a long way. Max Jacob. PS. Do you remember when Clément Vautel was artistic director of Le Rire, and we met in the anteroom, you in boots and me, God knows how? If you think of the poor, send your collection to the priest of St Benoît (Loiret) who has no shortage of miseries to relieve. »

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A year after the death of his friend Modigliani, Max Jacob decided to renounce artificial paradises and, in June 1921, on the advice of Abbot Weil, went into exile in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire to find peace and immerse myself in work: “I came here to crush myself before God,” he wrote.

In 1928, tired of his spiritual retreat, “which beautified his soul”, he returned to Paris, broke. Eight years later, in 1936, he returned to Saint-Benoît in disaster, “as a fisherman”.

It was on these lands that the Orléans Gestapo arrested him on February 24, 1944. On the train that took him to Drancy, he wrote a last note to the priest of Saint-Benoît: ““I trust in God and in my friends. I thank him for the martyrdom that is beginning. » He died a few days later in the Camp de la Muette infirmary, on March 5, 1944.