"Avril, mon doux petit Avril, chaque fois que tu t'en vas, tu emportes un peu de mon cœur, qui ne peut se détacher de toi, et te suit tristement."

Autograph letter signed "Pauline" by Renée Vivien, addressed to Natalie Clifford Barney and written in black ink on a double sheet with the poetess's silver monogram letterhead.
Very beautiful and poetic love letter from the Muse of violets, languishing for her "dear white Lily": "Je n'ai pas pu te demander cet après-midi si je te verrais demain, mon doux Avril, mais tu as bien compris n'est-ce pas ? qu'il me serait aussi impossible de vivre un jour sans toi, que de me priver des lumières, du soleil ou des fleurs. [...] Avril, mon doux petit Avril, chaque fois que tu t'en vas, tu emportes un peu de mon cœur, qui ne peut se détacher de toi, et te suit tristement. Tu es pour moi la poésie, la consolation et le rêve. Tu mets de la beauté dans ma vie et dans mon âme - quand je me réveille chaque jour et je pense à toi, c'est la perpétuelle éclosion de quelque miraculeuse amour. Je vis dans un conte de fées, un pays où tout est bleu et d'où la tristesse a disparu. Pense à moi ce soir, avant d'aller rêver dans l'au-delà et le lointain du sommeil." ["I could not ask you this afternoon if I would see you tomorrow, my sweet April, but you understood, didn't you? that it would be as impossible for me to live a day without you as to deprive myself of light, sun or flowers. [...] April, my sweet little April, each time you leave, you take with you a piece of my heart, which cannot detach itself from you, and follows you sadly. You are for me poetry, consolation and dream. You bring beauty into my life and into my soul - when I wake each day and think of you, it is the perpetual blossoming of some miraculous love. I live in a fairy tale, a country where everything is blue and from which sadness has disappeared. Think of me tonight, before going to dream in the beyond and the distance of sleep."]
The letter then takes on a more sensual tone: "J'aime tes cheveux blonds. Je leur envoie un long baiser. Les lys que j'ai dans ma chambre sont tristes parce que tu n'es plus là. Ils t'envoient leur âme dans un parfum. Ils t'aiment, comme moi ; mais moins que moi." ["I love your blonde hair. I send them a long kiss. The lilies I have in my room are sad because you are no longer there. They send you their soul in a fragrance. They love you, like me; but less than me."] During their first night of love, Renée had filled her room with lilies, transforming it into a "chapelle ardente" (N.Clifford Barney, Je me souviens...). Jean-Paul Goujon notes: "The choice of lilies was very much in the taste of the period: let us remember Mucha's posters, Schwabe's paintings, Lorrain's poems. But Vivien, who certainly remembered certain pages, filled with flowers and perfumes, from Zola's La Faute de l'abbé Mouret, seems to have wanted to celebrate mystical nuptials coupled with a sort of perfumed death."
It was at the end of 1899 and through Violette Shillito that Renée Vivien - then Pauline Tarn - made the acquaintance of Natalie Clifford Barney "cette Américaine plus souple qu'une écharpe, dont l'étincelant visage brille de cheveux d'or, de prunelles bleu de mer, de dents implacables" ["this American more supple than a scarf, whose sparkling face shines with golden hair, sea-blue eyes, implacable teeth"] (Colette, Claudine à Paris). Natalie, who had just lived through a summer idyll with the scandalous Liane de Pougy who initiated her into Sapphism, paid only discreet attention to this new acquaintance. Renée, however, was totally captivated by the young American and would relate this coup de foudre in her autobiographical novel Une Femme m'apparut: "J'évoquai l'heure déjà lointaine où je la vis pour la première fois, et le frisson qui me parcourut lorsque mes yeux rencontrèrent ses yeux d'acier mortel, ses yeux aigus et bleus comme une lame. J'eus l'obscur prescience que cette femme m'intimait l'ordre du destin, que son visage était le visage redouté de mon avenir. Je sentis près d'elle les vertiges lumineux qui montent de l'abîme, et l'appel de l'eau très profonde. Le charme du péril émanait d'elle et m'attirait inexorablement. Je n'essayai point de la fuir, car j'aurais échappé plus aisément à la mort." ["I evoked the already distant hour when I saw her for the first time, and the shiver that ran through me when my eyes met her mortal steel eyes, her sharp and blue eyes like a blade. I had the obscure prescience that this woman was giving me the order of destiny, that her face was the dreaded face of my future. I felt near her the luminous vertigo that rises from the abyss, and the call of very deep water. The charm of peril emanated from her and attracted me inexorably. I did not try to flee her, for I would have escaped death more easily."] "Winter 1899-1900. Beginning of the idyll. One evening, Vivien is invited by her new friend to the studio of Mme Barney [Natalie's mother], 153 avenue Victor-Hugo, at the corner of rue de Longchamp. Natalie ventures to read verses of her composition. When Vivien tells her she loves these verses, she replies that it is better to love the poet. An answer quite worthy of the Amazon." (J.-P. Goujon, Tes blessures sont plus douces que leurs caresses) There followed two years of unequal happiness, punctuated by Natalie's recurring infidelities and Renée's morbid jealousy, whose letters oscillate between passionate declarations and painful mea culpa. "Renée Vivien is the daughter of Sappho and Baudelaire, she is the flower of evil 1900 with fevers, broken flights, sad voluptuousness." (Jean Chalon, Portrait d'une séductrice)
In 1901 came an important break that would last almost two years; Renée, despite Natalie's solicitations and the intermediaries she sent to win her back, resisted. "The two friends saw each other again, and it was, in August 1905, the pilgrimage to Lesbos, which constituted a disappointment for Natalie Barney and remained without tomorrow. [...] The spring was definitively broken. The two former friends stopped seeing each other from 1907, and Vivien died without their having seen each other again." (J.-P. Goujon, Ibid.)
Precious and very rare letter from Sappho 1900 to the Amazon.