"Toi, tu peux m'écrire en Français. J'ai du mal à l'écrire mais je le comprends très bien".

Autograph letter signed by Lawrence Durrell addressed to his lover Jani Brun dating from the beginning of their relationship. One page in blue ballpoint pen. Envelope included.
The writer addresses here one of the first letters of his correspondence with his young friend from Montpellier, which extended over more than two decades. Still unaccustomed to the French language, he asked for help translating his letter: "J'espère bien mieux te connaître [...] Gérard a traduit ceci de l'anglais pour moi. Comprendrais-tu si la prochaine fois j'écrivais en anglais [...] ?" ["I hope to get to know you much better [...] Gérard translated this from English for me. Would you understand if next time I wrote in English [...] ?"]

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 "Tartès house," his large residence 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 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 Henry Miller also fell under the charm of "Buttons," praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional unpublished letters.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.