There are so many ways to love even if there are only proofs of love, as the poet said. Epistolary love no longer exists except in posthumous books or dark cupboards, handwritten letters, sometimes on Bible paper, like a prayer soaring on the wings of a common guardian angel. The lovers perfumed their letters, slipped a poppy there, that of Mouloudji’s song.
The post served them as a drunken boat, beating down the wait, blowing the sail of desire, landing sooner or later. Not a text message, not an e-mail can compete with this poetry of paper, of the object that one tears, that one smells, of the beloved calligraphy, of the contagious hope, of the words which soar and spin the along the sheet. Not one, not even a hundred.
I’m old enough to have known all the variations. Years later, we can still read them, these handwritten missives from another century, of a forgotten temporality, like those exchanged by Maria Casarès and Albert Camus. The tragedian and the writer are taken these days to the theater by a masterful Anne Dorval and her sensitive play partner Steve Gagnon in I’m writing to you in the middle of a beautiful storm.
I didn’t choose you. You entered, by chance, into a life of which I was not proud, and from that day something began to change, slowly, in spite of me, in spite of you.
The most beautiful thing about this banal but unique adventure is not so much to arouse love, but to be “seen” and to let oneself be seen. A completely different matter, and much rarer. Read Correspondence. (1944-1959) by Camus and Casarès invites us to a dance, to a masterful momentum, of the order of the divine and of alchemy, bodies and souls forever transformed by this encounter. The word “transport” is in love, as a reminder. “Thus, the words of love will be posted by the hands of faith, as Victor Hugo would say,” Camus wrote to him (February 16, 1951). Eight hundred and sixty-five letters posted…
The distant sweet words exchanged between two artists separated by obligations and their art, sometimes illness and long convalescences, are all the more painful. The lack of the other is a cruel presence and an inner fire. “There is no love of living without despair of living”, wrote Albert, whom Maria’s love did not blind for all that: “For it is false, I know it for myself, that the blind love, he wrote to her. On the contrary, it makes perceptible what without it would not come into existence and which is nevertheless what is most real in this world: the pain of the one we love. (January 12, 1950)
Write the unnameable lack
One thing strikes me in these exchanges of paper: no one saves himself or fears ridicule. Everything is said and offered in what Camus designates as the love-gift, which he opposes to the love of pride. The offering is total, without sparing one’s back, with passion and courage, with surrender.
Reading them, we understand that certain things, those that touch on the sacred, can only be revealed in writing, which provides the intimacy and solitude necessary for outpourings. The recipient becomes a mirror with moving reflections, a privileged reader of this diary.
The letter-writer can be deceptive—I have known some “false Verlaines”, “false Rimbauds” who smother me in their prose. Syntax is more easily played than sincerity in certain cases.
Nevertheless, neither Camus nor Casarès could have sustained this enchantment over such a long period and on a daily basis (and even several times a day) without a deep commitment and without the help of paper.
Same emotion on edge when reading François Mitterrand in Letters to Anne (1962-1995), even if Anne Pingeot’s answers are absent from this pad of 1218 letters.
My love,
It’s been so long since I wrote those two words. Saying them is so good, but putting them on this paper for you gives me such a strong pleasure… that I think I will do it again.
Until the very last line, the politician and writer (and he is a talented one!) devotes an undiminished love to her in a sustained momentum, both old France and young first chilled. “You have always given me more. You were my chance of life. How not to love you more? (September 22, 1995). He dies a few months later.
She was 19 when they met, he was 46. They hid and protected their morganatic family during all these years, until 1994, an open secret exposed by the paparazzi of Paris Match20 years after the birth of their daughter, Mazarine.
More words, more words
As much for Camus as for Casarès, for Mitterrand or for Simone de Beauvoir, who met the writer Nelson Algren during a trip to the United States in 1947, love transformed everything, the career too. The writer Irène Frain has drawn a very nice novel — Beauvoir in love — imagined from the love letters of Beauvoir exchanged with Algren during those years during which the woman of letters wrote The second sex.
[…] because I will pass and it will remain, because beings pass and feelings remain
Camus admits it in 1949: “What I have said, written or done since the spring of 1944 has always been different, in depth, from what happened for me and in me, before. I breathed better, I hated fewer things, I freely admired what deserved to be admired. Before you, outside of you, I didn’t adhere to anything. »
Roland Barthes, their contemporary, who has already paid homage to Casarès (https://bit.ly/3H6CcFe), written in Fragments of a love speech “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It’s as if I had words as fingers or fingers at the end of my words. My language trembles with desire. ” Here is. Paper is just an interface.
These backstage loves are faithful to a single law: that of fervor and honor, a sepia word. Would they have succeeded in defying the repeated assaults of everyday life, conformism and its routine? Nothing is less sure. Hope makes alive. Casarès had the intuition: “When I see you again, we will get to know each other again. Wonderful way of never getting tired of ourselves; that of never finding the time to get to the end of each other. (February 16, 1951)
The price of love is high when it tears us from our mortal condition.