Carte de visite autographe adressée à Jani Brun

Autograph postcard by Lawrence Durrell addressed to Jani Brun. A few lines in ink. Envelope included.
The ink has slightly smudged, the envelope having presumably been dampened.
The writer addresses this card from Sommières, his Languedoc retreat, to his lover Janine Brun: "Janine est-ce que vos dates sont fixés [sic] ? Je ne sais pas si je suis de retour de Londres avant le 10 samedi - écris moi pour me dire - Love, Larry" ["Janine are your dates fixed? I don't know if I'll be back from London before Saturday the 10th - write to tell me - Love, Larry"]

After many years spent in Greece, Egypt and Rhodes, the travel writer Lawrence Durrell was forced to flee Cyprus following popular uprisings that led the island to its independence from the British crown. Rich only with a shirt and a typewriter but crowned with the success of his novel Bitter Lemons, he arrived in France in 1956 and settled in the Languedoc village of Sommières. In the "maison Tartès," his large house surrounded by trees, he wrote the second part of his work, his monumental Avignon Quintet, devoted himself to painting and received his illustrious friends, including the couple Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, London publisher Alan G. Thomas, and his two daughters Penelope and Sappho.
Among the olive trees and under the Mediterranean sun, he met in the mid-1960s the young and vivacious "Jany" (Janine Brun), a woman from Montpellier in her thirties of devastating beauty, who worked in the Department of Antiquities at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was nicknamed "Buttons" in memory of their first meeting, where the young woman wore a dress covered with buttons. Henry Miller also fell under the charm of "Buttons," praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional unpublished letters. The three companions spent memorable Parisian evenings of which we keep precious autograph traces through their epistolary exchanges. Recommended by Durrell, she made numerous trips particularly to England from where she received extensive correspondence from the writer as well as original artworks signed with his artist pseudonym, Oscar Epfs.