"m[ake] great haste"

Autograph postcard signed by Lawrence Durrell addressed to Jani Brun, written in black felt-tip pen on the verso of a black and white view of the interior of the temple of Diana in Nîmes. Envelope included.
The writer gives news of his daughter: "Saph part pour Israel troisième semaine de février" ["Saph leaves for Israel third week of February"] and eagerly awaits the arrival of his lover: "m[ake] great haste" (come quickly).

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 its 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 (Les citrons acides), 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 sparkling "Jany" (Janine Brun), a woman from Montpellier in her thirties of devastating beauty, who worked in the Antiquities department at the Sorbonne in Paris. She was nicknamed "Buttons" in memory of their first meeting, when 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 Henry Miller also fell under the charm of "Buttons," praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional unpublished letters.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 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 artist pseudonym, Oscar Epfs.