"Tout le monde chez Bernard Stone demande de vos nouvelles"

Autograph postcard signed "Larry" from Lawrence Durrell addressed to Jani Brun, written in red and black felt-tip pens, on the reverse of a reproduction of a Parisian pink list.
The writer, nostalgic, gives news from London as he prepares to sign his latest book at London bookseller Bernard Stone's shop. His bookshop was well-known and described by poet Michael Horowitz as "the merriest backwater of that time": "Tout le monde chez Bernard Stone demande de vos nouvelles : ils me prient de te rappeler le changement d'adresse. Il est à Covent Garden maintenant. C'est là que je signe ce soir. Nostalgie, grisailles, souvenirs" ["Everyone at Bernard Stone's asks for news of you: they ask me to remind you of the change of address. He's at Covent Garden now. That's where I'm signing tonight. Nostalgia, greyness, memories"].
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 "Tartès house," his grand 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 sparkling "Jany" (Janine Brun), a woman from Montpellier in her thirties with 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Miller also fell under the charm of "Buttons," praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional letters that remain unpublished. 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 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.