"Je lirai « Séraphita » pour te retrouver un peu dans ces pages de Balzac."

Autograph letter signed "Pauline" by Renée Vivien, written in black ink on two double sheets of letterhead paper from 24 Hyde Park Street. Transverse folds inherent to posting.
A very beautiful and poetic letter written from London where the young Renée savors a sweet melancholy: "Today, there was no sun, a light fog, a dark and sad atmosphere. I was pleased by it, — I hate spring when you are no longer here, and the sun and soft air hurt me. I love the sadness of the sky and the moon which goes well with my thoughts." Despite a very busy schedule ("I am very tired this evening, — I return from the Alhambra, where mama took me to see the military ballet and hear the patriotic songs. [...] I went skating in the afternoon, in the morning, I went to see one of my friends here, who is very kind although having too much religion for my taste."), the young woman is bored in this city that she profoundly detests ("How can you be jealous, you whom I adore, of London, which I hate? — I have been unhappy since I entered this city. It is dark, it has a bad influence on my destiny. It brings me misfortune. It will end up killing me if I stay. I am afraid of it, I want to leave, to join you my darling, my spring, you, who are the being of light and beauty, my love, my happiness and my consolation.") and finds comfort in the memory of her beloved of whom she thinks every moment: "You are right to feel my thoughts around you, — I desperately throw my soul across space so that it finds you — Your memory is in all my actions, all my words, — it is you that I see through the things that surround me." Natalie is everywhere, even in her reading: "I will read 'Séraphita' to find you a little in those pages of Balzac. Everything that reminds me of you, everything that has some connection with you, even distant, is dear to me." As Jean Chalon shows in his biography of Natalie Clifford Barney (Portrait d'une séductrice), Séraphita is a founding novel of the Amazon's thought and one of the first books she bought upon her arrival in Europe: "Natalie had vainly sought this philosophical novel by Balzac in the bookstores of Washington. She would find this book in Europe and push refinement to the point of reading the angelic avatars of Séraphitus-Séraphita in that Norway which forms its setting." From this underlined passage in her copy, one notices that she retains more of its feminism than the concept of intersexuality: "Would this not be using your rights as a man? We must always please you, relax you, always be cheerful, and have only the whims that amuse you. What must I do, my friend? Do you want me to sing, to dance, when fatigue takes away the use of my voice and legs? Gentlemen, even if we were dying, we must still smile at you! You call this, I believe, reigning. Poor women! I pity them." As evidenced by a letter addressed to her previous lover Liane de Pougy, she had already introduced her to this Balzacian heroine: "You will come to me, I will go to you and we will marry our lives. That day you will read me Séraphîta. She will awaken our slumbering souls and you will lend to the sleeping words the beauty of your voice. It will be our litany of love."

It was at the end of 1899 and through Violette Shillito that Renée Vivien - then Pauline Tarn - made the acquaintance of Natalie Clifford Barney "this American more supple than a scarf, whose sparkling face shines with golden hair, sea-blue pupils, and implacable teeth" (Colette, Claudine à Paris). Natalie, who had just lived a summer idyll with the sulfurous Liane de Pougy who had initiated her into sapphism, paid only discreet attention to this new acquaintance. Renée on the other hand was totally captivated by the young American and would relate this love at first sight in her autobiographical novel Une Femme m'apparut : "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 eyes of mortal steel, her sharp 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 vertigos that rise 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 from 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 Mrs. Barney's studio [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. A response quite worthy of the Amazon." (J.-P. Goujon, Tes blessures sont plus douces que leurs caresses) Two years of unequal happiness would follow, 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 rupture that would last almost two years; Renée, despite Natalie's solicitations and the intermediaries she sends to reconquer her, resists. "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 sequel. [...] The spring was definitively broken. The two former friends ceased to see each other from 1907, and Vivien died without them having seen each other again." (J.-P. Goujon, Ibid.)