"Oui telephonez moi quand tu es à Sauve-qui-pleut... "

Suggestive autograph carte de visite signed by Lawrence Durrell addressed to Jani Brun, written in brown and mauve felt-tip pens, with accompanying envelope.
"dear Buttons. Oui telephonez moi quand tu es à Sauve-qui-pleut et je viendrai te chercher (un coeur dessiné). 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 in 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 "Tartès house," his large dwelling 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 thirty-year-old woman from Montpellier of devastating beauty, who worked at the Antiquities department of 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 Henry Miller also fell under the charm of "Buttons," praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional unpublished letters.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 retain precious autograph traces through their epistolary exchanges. Recommended by Durrell, she made numerous trips notably to England from where she received vast correspondence from the writer as well as original works of art signed with his artist pseudonym, Oscar Epfs.