LOUŸS Pierre (1870-1925). Autograph MANUSCRIT; 3 pages in-8 in blue ink (a little faded). Memories on José-Maria de Heredia. Louÿs recalls José-Maria de HEREDIA and his private reading of Trophées in 1900, as well as a memorable reading of a poem by Victor Hugo, Plein ciel. "Another day, it was in 1900, I think, on my third return from Italy, - I was smoking alone with Heredia in the dining room of the rue Balzac: vast and high room badly lit. It could have been eleven o'clock in the evening. We were talking about the Legend of the Centuries as two ancient Christians would have talked about Saint John. After a few minutes, Heredia got up and said: "Stay, I'll read it to you". Why? If there is a book that I know by heart, it is this one. I waited without curiosity; I did not suspect that I was going to live an unforgettable quarter of an hour of my existence"... After this reading of Plein ciel, in which he rediscovered the poem said with a "sacred horror", Louÿs returned to the often mocked way in which Heredia read his own verses: "Heredia worked with his conscience as much as with his talent. He wanted to hope that his work was not beneath his pains. He valued in himself the conscience, the pain, the talent and the work. But whatever beautiful sonnet he could do, even the last one, the Vision of Ajax, he did not say it like the stanza of Full Sky or the hideousness of the Scorpion makes the Sagittarius rear its head.