A Letter to Father Christmas…

And to Mommy Deerest.

What if the pleasure of writing started from that very first letter we sent to Santa as a child?  Just starting to read and write, we set out on our journeys as secret and passionate authors.

What if our fascination for the correspondence of writers and artists owed something to this precious memory, both intimate and common, of our own awakening to the art of writing letters?

What if all letters, written as friends or lovers were rewrites of this original missive, carefully thought, beautifully crafted, duly addressed, rigorously stamped and proudly posted to a bearded recipient from the North Pole...

To inaugurate this month devoted to Christmas lists and weekly suggestions for unique, personal, and precious gifts, Le Feu Follet pays tribute to beautiful letters by revealing the poetic secrets of a deeply melancholic and raw letter from a son exiled from his mother, but whose "mud" conceals the secret alchemy of Baudelairean "gold".

This Week's Theme

« Scripta volant »

Edition-Originale respects “to the letter” the traditions of correspondence and offers you this week its first list of gift ideas, on the theme of autographed love letters, break-up letters or both, published or unpublished correspondence, epistolary novels or letters to an invented friend, secret confidences or open letters...

Please find, dear fellow reader,

our best gift ideas.

Our lists of gift ideas

What do you read, my lord?

_______

The Investigation.

A voyage into the Baudelairian spleen : « The state of disgust in which I find myself makes everything seem even worse. »  

A superb autograph letter from a son to his mother, subtly revealing the poetical reasons for his final self-imposed exile, the inverted mirror of the first, enforced, wandering of his youth in the Mascarene Islands, the writer's only two voyages.

If the young man could somehow – we don't know how – escape to the far-off Reunion island, the old man nonetheless didn't dare leave Belgium, which was so close, and this melancholic letter augured the end of his days spent by the North Sea, as somber as his initial trip to the South Seas had been bright...

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