VIVIEN (RENÉE) Three autograph letters signed ('Renée'), to her lover Kérimé Turkhan Pacha ('Mon trés Douce', 'Ma rose rouge, mon bel amour', 'Mon amour, mon amour'), in French, all but one written in purple ink, the first long letter addressed to 'My very sweet one', beginning '... Your letter intoxicated me, like a perfume. You are a living mystery...', professing her love and speaking of her previous lovers Vally ('...She decided the whole of my destiny. For eighteen months I lived the strange dream of our troubled love...') and Eva ('...she swore to me the other day that she would kill herself if I left her for another... - And as for me, I feel for her a painful tenderness in which friendship plays more part than love...'), that she has never loved a man ('...I would be incapable of a masculine love...'), continuing in a poetic vein '...Oh! all your roses! All your roses that I shall breathe one day! Oh! all your cool springs, where I shall bathe my weariness! Oh! all your perfumes! - I love you - I love you...', quoting Swinburne as translated by Paule Riversdale (her pseudonym), that she is living in a dream ('...It is painful and beautiful to love a dream... One day I will hold you in my feverish arms - and my lips will seek and find your lips. And your eyelids will close beneath my kiss. I will teach you in what vehement and tender fashion Psappho caressed Athis and Erasma...'), ending '...our love is stronger than all loves, because it is eternal...'; the second continuing in the same vein ('...My red rose, my beautiful love, I received your letter this morning. I thought my heart would suffocate me...'), anticipating their next meeting ('...of knowing again the unforgotten, unforgettable taste of her wonderful kiss...'), and commenting '...Eva has calmed down...'; the third asking if she may come to Constantinople, recalling '...I see your eyes of infinite darkness, I see your face of a Moorish princess... The Florentine night makes me think of that other night on the Bosphorus... I hear your faint and sweet sighs...', ending '...The night is ours...', 19 pages, dust-staining and marks, creased at folds, 8vo (167 x 124mm.), 3 rue Jean-Baptiste Dumas, [first and third n.d., second 19 January 1906] Footnotes: 'MOI, JE T'EMPORTE DANS LES ETOILES. LA NUIT EST À NOUS': THREE EROTIC LOVE LETTERS FROM POET RENÉE VIVIEN TO HER TURKISH LOVER. The correspondence between Renée Vivien (1877-1909) and her lover Kérimé Turkhan Pacha (1874-1948) lasted some four years and our series gives a taste of their passionate and turbulent relationship. Admitting here that she could never love a man, Vivien writes in florid prose of her love, and her feelings are given extra frisson by the clandestine nature of their relationship: '... The Pasha must not know that I am in Constantinople...' she writes. Although she wrote exclusively in French and lived in Paris from the age of 21 when she came into her inheritance, Vivien was born Pauline Mary Tarn in London. She is widely considered to be one of the first noteworthy lesbian poets of the twentieth-century and before Kérimé, had embarked on a romantic entanglement with the wealthy socialite Baroness Hélène van Zuylen, of the Rothschild family. In 1906, Kérime Turkhan Pacha, the wife of a Turkish diplomat, sent her an admiring letter which led to a passionate correspondence of which these letters are a part. Whilst continuing her relationship with van Zuylen, they enjoyed brief secret encounters in Constantinople, with Vivien recalling '...The foliage on your balcony shelters our trembling joy... I hear your faint and sweet sighs...'. By 1908 both relationships were over, and Vivien turned to alcohol and drugs for comfort, leading to her premature death in 1909. Colette, Vivien's neighbour, wrote of this period in The Pure and the Impure, published in 1932. Variously dubbed 'Sappho 1900', 'the enfant terrible of the Belle Epoque' or 'Muse of the Violets', there has been a renewal of interest in her work in recent years: 'The decadent themes of her poetry, the timing of her untimely death, and her links with other prominent members of Paris-Lesbos conspired, for better and for worse, to turn Vivien into a lasting emblem of the Belle Époque - a nostalgic synthesis of the excesses of pre-war Europe... Whether she is decried as a bad feminist or celebrated as a martyr to the cause of gay rights, Vivien's writing often continues to come second to her life...' (Bodleian Library blog online). The letterhead of our second letter in the series features an embossed design of violets, which, with her choice of violet ink, alludes to her obsession with the flower, which appears in the title of several poems (her anthology Dans un coin de violettes was published posthumously in 1910), and which is said to refer to her unconsummated relationship with her childhood friend Violet Shillito. Vivien's letters to Kérimé are published in Jean Leproux (ed.), Lettres de Renée Vivien à Kérimé, 1998. This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: * * VAT on imported items at a preferential rate of 5% on Hammer Price and the prevailing rate on Buyer's Premium. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing