[“My dear colleague, I heartily approve of your having abandoned, for your newspaper, the title Pot-Bouille, which meant nothing […]. I have withdrawn from the press and am resolved not to return to it; why then should I set myself up as a giver of advice? […] That would be playing a part, and I do not wish to risk such ridicule. Go bravely ahead on your own. You have no need of me. When you were launching Pot-Bouille, Zola's authorization was indeed required. But you are launching Rabelais, and Zola has nothing to do with it here, Rabelais being quite capable of explaining itself.”]
Pot-Bouille first appeared as a serial in Le Gaulois between 23 January 1882 and 14 April 1882, immediately praised by Guy de Maupassant in his article “L’Adultère.”
The one-volume edition, published by Charpentier on 15 April 1882, appeared just as the serial concluded: readers discovered a scathing critique of the bourgeoisie, forming a diptych with Au bonheur des dames, with which it shares its central character, the enterprising Octave Mouret.
This July letter is addressed to Adrien Farge, i.e. Joséphine Guéroult, the editor of the journal Le Rabelais, launched that same year, 1882, in Rouen. Maupassant would contribute two texts to it (“Garçon, un Bock!” and “Au bois”), and readily cited the journal in his letters: “in the provinces, it is often in the small newspapers that one finds this disinterested love of the arts and the boldness needed to undertake pious works of this kind, which will bring in no money,” he would write in 1883 when Le Rabelais organized a small local celebration in honor of Louis Bouilhet in Cany, his native town.