Simone de Beauvior to Nelson Algren

29.6.08

Simone de Beauvior (1908-1986) French existential writer, novelist, and feminist. In 1947 she met American writer Nelson Algren (1909-1981), in Chicago during a trip to the US. Despite their cultural and philosophical differences, their transatlantic romance was torrid and enduring, lasting for more than seventeen years.


My beloved one, I don't know why I waited so long before saying I loved you. I just wanted to be sure and not to say easy, empty words. But it seems to me now love was there since the beginning. Anyways, now it is here, it is love and my heart aches. I am happy to be so bitterly unhappy because I know you are unhappy, too, and it is sweet to have a part of the same sadness. With you pleasure was love, and now pain is love too. We must know every kind of love. We'll know the joy of meeting again. I want it, I need it, I want it, and I'll get it. Wait for me. I wait for you. I love you more even than I said, more maybe than you know.

written, GeminiSide

Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry

26.6.08

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) A short story writer, born in New Zealand. She wrote her first major work, Prelude in 1917. After a short and unsuccessful marriage to George Bowden, she married, in 1918, writer John Middleton Murry (1889-1957), she died in 1923 at the age of 35.


You are all about me -- I seem to breathe you - hear you -- hear you in me and of me. Last night, there was a moment before you got in bed. You stood, quite naked, bending forward a little -- talking. It was only for an instant. I saw you -- I loved you so -- loved your body with such tenderness - Ah my dear -- And I am not thinking now of "passion". No, of that other thing that makes me feel that every inch of you is so precious to me. Your soft shoulders -- your creamy warm skin, your ears, cold like shells are cold -- your long legs and your feet that I love to clasp with my feet -- the feeling of your belly -- & your thin young back -- Just below that bone that sticks out at the back of your neck you have a little mole. It is partly because we are young that I feel this tenderness -- I love your youth. And so perfect is my love for you that I am, as it were, still, silent to my very soul. I want nobody but you for my lover and my friend and to nobody but you shall I be faithful. I am yours forever.

written, GeminiSide

Ludwig van Beethoven to the "Immortal Beloved"

22.6.08

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). German composer, and is considered one of the titanic figures in the history of music. Never married, he nevertheless fell in love several times. On July 5, 1812 he returned to Teplitz and, over the course of the next two days composed one of the most remarkable love letters ever written. The letter was addressed to the unnamed " unsterbliche Geliebte", or immortal Beloved. This exceptional letter was found among Beethoven's personal effects after his death. It had never been sent. The Identity of its mysterious recipient has been a subject for entire books. Current research points to Antonie Brentano, an aristocratic Viennese lady he had known since 1810, who was married to a Frankfurt Businessman.


Can our love endure without sacrifices, without out demanding everything from one another; can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, that I am not wholly yours?
Be forever my faithful, my only sweetheart, my all, as I am yours.
Whatever must and shall be our fate -- yours faithful.
However much you love me -- my love for you is even greater.
Is not our love truly founded in Heaven - and what is more, as strongly cemented as the firmament of Heaven?
Even when I am in bed my thoughts rush to you, my immortal beloved, now and then joyfully , then again sadly, waiting to know whether fate will hear our prayer -- To face life I must lice altogether with you or never see you. Yes, I am resolved to be a wanderer abroad until I can fly to your arms and say that I have found my true home with you and enfolded in your arms let my soul be wafted to the realm of blessed spirits -- alas, unfortunately it must be so -- You will become composed, the more so as you know that I am faithful to you; no other woman can ever possess my heart -- never -- never-- Oh God, why must one be separated from her who is so dear. Yet my life in Vienna at present is a miserable life -- Your love has made me both the happiest and unhappiness of mortals -- At my age I now need stability and regularity in my life -- can this coexist with our relationship? Be calm; for only by calmly considering our lives can we achieve our purpose to live together -- be calm -- love me -- Today -- yesterday -- what tearful longing for you -- for you -- you -- my life -- my all -- all good wishes to you -- Oh, do continue to love me -- never misjudge your lover's most faithful heart.
Ever yours
Ever mine
Ever ours



written, GeminiSide

Honoré de Balzac to Évelive Hanska

19.6.08

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850). French-born novelist. 1832: he received a fan letter from a married Polish noble woman, Countess Éveline Hanska. A correspondence ensued, and they met twice. The two promised to marry each other once her husband died. Their relationship endured for seven-teen years, and their correspondence, collected in the four-volume Letters to a Foreigner, is one of the greatest examples of epistolary love. Finally in March 1850, when he was already mortally ill, the two wed. Balzac died in Paris five month later.


My Beloved Angel
I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them. I can no longer think of nothing but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me. As for my heart, there you will always be -- very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason. This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me. I rise up every moment saying to myself, "Come, I am going there!" Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict.
This is not life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation! Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders' threads. O, my darling Eva, you did not know it, I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talked to you as if you were there. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself, "She is mine!" Ah! The angels are not as happy in paradise as I was yesterday!


written, GeminiSide

Alfred Dreyfus to Lucie Dreyfus

15.6.08

Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935). A French-Jewish army officer, best remembered for his arrest for treason, which initiated a twelve-year controversy widely known as the Dreyfus Affair. While in prison, and just prior to his banishment to Devil's Island, he wrote his wife Lucie about his love for her. Finally, in 1906, the verdict was overturned, and all charges were dropped.


I am denied the right to see you. But I must trust in God's justice. In the end truth must prevail.
Crushed down in this sombre cell, alone with my reeling brain, I have had moments when I have been beside myself.
I embrace you a thousand times, as I love you, as I adore you.


written, GeminiSide

John Rodgers to Minerva Denison

10.6.08

John Rodgers (1773-1838). The highest ranking American navel officer during the War of 1812 and U.S. Secretary of the Navy in 1823. John's missives won Minerva Denison's heart and the two were married upon is return to America following the Tripolitan War.


The magnetic power of your charms have to this moment prevented my heart from varying a single second. I know no art in love as you may plainly discover by the diction of my scribbling, but the professions I have made were dictated by heart as honest, as proud, and honorable as that of any other being in existence, and if to possess such feelings be a crime, the errors are not mine but his who made us both. I feel my intellect so perfectly inadequate to an expression of the sensations I feel, that I am oblig'd with painful reluctance to drop the subject.

written, GeminiSide

Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

6.6.08

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962). English poet and novelist. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). British novelist , essayist, critic, feminist, socialist, pacifist and one of the leaders in the modernist movement.


I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.
I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this-- But oh my dear, I can't be cleaver and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have broken down my defenses. And I don't really resent it.

written, GeminiSide

Zelda Fitzgerald to F. Scott Fitzgerald

1.6.08

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948) American novelist. The beautiful daughter of a well-to-do family from Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda was a free-spirited, rebellious girl when she met author F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) in July 1918. He noted in his journal that on September 7th he fell in love with Zelda, and the two were married in a small ceremony at New York St. Patrick's Cathedral in April 1920. A failed ballet dancer and artist, she had a modestly successful career as a novelist, her most famous work being, Save Me the Waltz (1932), which she wrote at Phillips Clinic in Baltimore, while recovering from her second mental breakdown. From the beginning, the two carried on an extremely unhealthy, yet enduring and intense love affair. Diagnosed as a schizophrenic, she died in a fire at the Highland Hospital Sanitarium where she had been admitted for depression.


I look down the tracks and see you coming-- and out of every haze and mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me-- Without you, dearest dearest I couldn't see or hear of feel or think-- or live-- I love you so and I'm never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night. It's like begging for mercy of a storm or killing beauty or growing old, without you. I want to kiss you so-- and in the back where your dear hair starts and your chest -- I love you -- and I can't tell you how much-- to think that I'll die without you knowing -- You've got to try [to] feel how much I do-- how inanimate I am when you're gone-- I can't even hate these damnable people-- Nobody's got any right to live but us-- and they're dirtying up our world and I can't hate them because I love you so-- Come quick-- Come quick to me-- I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper-- if you ran away with another woman and starved me and beat me-- I still would want you I know-- Lover, Lover, Darling-- Your wife



written, GeminiSide

Tina Etheredge