"youth at the prow and beauty at the helm" luxe et voupté - dans le Club Méditerranée, everything is done for you"

Autograph postcard signed by Lawrence Durrell addressed to Jani Brun, his young French lover, written in blue felt-tip pen, on the verso of a humorous illustration featuring Poseidon.
The writer had stayed at Club Méditerranée and sings its praises with a verse from the neo-medieval poem The Bard, by Thomas Gray and one from Baudelaire: "youth at the prow and beauty at the helm" (Jeunesse à la proue et beauté à la barre) luxe et voupté - dans le Club Méditerranée, everything is done for you (tout est fait pour vous) J'ai envie de rester encore vingt ans ici. That would make me 110 years old (j'aurais 110 ans)."

After many years spent in Greece, Egypt and Rhodes, the travelling 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 (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 vivacious "Jany" (Janine Brun), a woman from Montpellier in her thirties of devastating beauty, who worked at the Department of Antiquities 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 Henry Miller also fell under the charm of "Buttons", praising her beauty and eternal youth in exceptional unpublished letters. The three companions spent memorable Parisian evenings of which we keep precious autograph traces through their epistolary exchanges. Recommended by Durrell, she made numerous trips, notably 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.