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Renée VIVIEN

Lettre autographe signée adressée à Natalie Clifford Barney et enrichie d'un poème intitulé "Le Miroir"

s.l. [Londres] 24 mars 1900, 10x15,7cm, 6 pages sur 2 doubles feuillets.

Handwritten signed letter addressed to Natalie Clifford Barney and enriched with a poem entitled « Le Miroir »
 

Handwritten manuscript letter by Renée Vivien signed “Pauline” and written in black ink on a double leaf, headed 24 Hyde Park Street. This letter contains a handwritten alexandrine poem entitled “Le Miroir”; never published on the initiative of the poet, but it has been transcribed in “Renée Vivien et ses masques” (in à l'encart, April 1980):
 
Je t'admire et ne suis que ton miroir fidèle
Car je m'abîme en toi pour t'aimer un peu mieux;
Je rêve ta beauté, je me confonds en elle,
Et j'ai fait de mes yeux le miroir de tes yeux
Je t'adore, et mon cœur est le profond miroir
Où ton humeur d'avril se reflète sans cesse,
Tout entier, il s'éclaire à tes moments d'espoir
Et se meurt lentement à ta moindre tristesse
Ô toujours la plus douce ô blonde entre les blondes,
Je t'adore, et mon corps est l'amoureux miroir
Où tu verras tes seins et tes hanches profondes,
Ces seins pâles qui sont si lumineux le soir!
Penche-toi, tu verras ton miroir tour à tour
Pâlir ou te sourire avec tes mêmes lèvres
Où trembleront encore les mêmes mots d'amour,
Tu le verras frémir des mêmes longues fièvres
Contemple ton miroir de chair tendre et nacrée
Car il s'est fait très pur afin de recevoir
Le reflet immortel de la beauté sacrée
Penche-toi longuement sur l'amoureux miroir!
 
The rest of this long missive has, however, remained unpublished. A very beautiful letter sent from London by the Muse aux Violettes who misses her “little one”: “Despite its slowness time passes, you see, and brings the hour that I await feverishly, the time to meet again, Natalie! Two more sad evenings, and the third you will be there to rock me in your arms! [...] Today, I was still disproportionately bored... I so need to see you again that I count the hours as they pass... I only think of you, obsessed, haunted, taken, possessed by you and by our memories. I am a poor, unhappy thing far from you.” Weary of society life (“We had the queen's dressing room – how chic, my darling! Lady Augustus Fitz Clarence invited us. She descends from a bastard of the King and is therefore an illegitimate relative of the sovereign!”), Renée lingers on the contemplation of a present from her “darling”: “Your ring, I love it so much, it is a bond of our love that never leaves me... I so regretted your dagger, that at the last moment I forgot to carry. Your ring, you see, is your memory on my finger, I look at it and part of our tenderness is embodied in it.”


It is at the end of 1899 and through Violette Shillito that Renée Vivien – then Pauline Tarn – met Natalie Clifford Barney "this American woman softer than a scarf, whose sparkling face shines with golden hair, sea blue eyes, never-ending teeth" (Colette, Claudine à Paris). Natalie, who had just experienced a summer romance with the scandalous Liane de Pougy who introduced her to sapphism, paid little attention to this new acquaintance. Renée, on the other hand, was totally captivated by the young American woman and describes this love at first sight in her autobiographical novel, Une femme m'apparut: "I lived again the hour, already well past, when I saw her for the first time, felt the shiver that ran through me when my eyes met the mortal steel of her look, those eyes blue and piercing as a blade. I had a dim premonition that this woman would determine the pattern of my fate, and that her face was the predestined face of my Future. Near her I felt the luminous dizziness which comes at the edge of an abyss, or the attraction of a very deep water. She radiated the charm of danger, which drew me to her inexorably." "Winter 1899-1900. Beginnings of the idyll. One evening, Vivien is invited by her new friend to Mme Barney's studio [Natalie's mother], 153 avenue Victor-Hugo, on the corner of the rue de Longchamp. Natalie finds the courage to read the verses of her composition. As Vivien tells her to love these verses, she tells her that it is better to love the poet. A response worthy of the Amazon." (J.-P. Goujon, Tes blessures sont plus douces que leurs caresses) Two years of unequal happiness will follow, punctuated by Natalie's recurring infidelities and Renée's sickly jealousy, the letters of which oscillate between inflamed declarations and painful admissions of guilt. "Renée Vivien is the daughter of Sappho and Baudelaire, she is the 1900 flower of evil with fevers, broken-up fights, sad delights." (Jean Chalon, Portrait d'une séductrice)

In 1901, a major break-up occurred which lasted almost two years; Renée, despite requests from Natalie and the others she sent to win her back, resisted. "The two friends saw each other again, and in August 1905, went on a pilgrimage to Lesbos, which was a disappointment for Natalie Barney and was short-lived. [...] The spring was broken once and for all. The two former friends stopped seeing each other in 1907, and Vivien died without them seeing each other again." (J.-P. Goujon, ibid.)

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