"dear and pretty chapeau jaune [...] phone-moi veux-tu ?"

Signed autograph postcard from Lawrence Durrell addressed to Jani Brun, written in black felt-tip pen, on the verso of a photograph topped with the humorous caption "Finies les vacances !! Les blés sont fauchés / Les vacanciers aussi !!" ["The holidays are over!! The wheat is cut / The vacationers too!!"]
The writer attempts to see his young French lover between two trips: "Dear and pretty chapeau jaune. je suis au mazet vendredi mais chez moi le soir. Vendredi je suis seul. phone-moi veux-tu ? si possible ? Car je m'en vais à Paris dimanche soir pour trois jours mais j'attends un coup de téléphone de là bas pour décider" ["Dear and pretty yellow hat. I'm at the mazet Friday but at home in the evening. Friday I'm alone. Will you phone me? if possible? Because I'm going to Paris Sunday evening for three days but I'm waiting for a phone call from there to decide"].



After many years spent in Greece, Egypt and Rhodes, the traveling writer Lawrence Durrell was forced to flee Cyprus following popular uprisings that led the island to independence from the British crown. Rich only with a shirt and a typewriter but crowned with the success of his novel Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, 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 with devastating beauty, who worked in the Antiquities department 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 Henry Miller also fell under the spell of "Buttons," praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional unpublished letters. The three companions spent memorable Parisian evenings of which we preserve 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 works of art signed with his artistic pseudonym, Oscar Epfs.