Violet Keppel Trefusis

9 September 1919
I want adventure. Adventure veiled and elusive in great cathedrals, wanton and provocative in the place, sly and surreptitious in a baignoire, flippant and derisive in the streets, romantic and difficult in the Earth’s open places!

23 August 1920
And Vita – of course, it would too wonderful if Vita came here. She is so beautiful and clever. (She knows Italian better than me – but I was in Florence longer than she was.) I simply adore Vita, but I don’t know if she is really fond of me.

21 September 1910
Thanks for an amusing letter. Allow me to felicitate my correspondent on her decision – worthy in every respect of a rapid and reliable intuition, which my susdite correspondante may well count among her proudest possessions.

21 September 1910
Thanks for an amusing letter. Allow me to felicitate my correspondent on her decision – worthy in every respect of a rapid and reliable intuition, which my susdite correspondante may well count among her proudest possessions.

I suppose she was afraid of linking her life indissolubly to mine. She had a horror of anything irrevocable.

When she ran away from me she was probably obeying some impulse of her own unruly nature. Now I come to think of it, her faults were those of a restive young animal rather of a human being.

She's lazy and human, and would never climb as high as the gods. They'd have to come down to her.

When I'm dead we'll always be together. My ashes will be scattered around the world. When I die I'll be able to travel for nothing.

2 July 1920
There is one thing I will never forgive you: that if you put any misconstruction on the motives which prompt this letter. I never thought I could be so brave as to write it, because each word I write is torture to me.

9 May 1919
Sometimes, before going to sleep, by dint of desiring you, I end by feeling your body stretched out by my side, all the warmth of quivering flesh, the kisses of your mouth, and the caresses of your fingers, and I feel faint, and I’m on the point of dying.

19 March 1920
I think of you as a mother sometimes for hours on end. I have today. Not only as a mother, but as a potential grandmother, great-grandmother. How my head burns.

2 July 1920
I want your happiness as well as my own, though I suppose you will not believe it, but O, I do!

2 July 1920
There is one thing I will never forgive you: that if you put any misconstruction on the motives which prompt this letter. I never thought I could be so brave as to write it, because each word I write is torture to me.

20 July 1919
And sometimes we loved each other so much we became inarticulate, content only to probe each other’s eyes for the secret that was secret no longer.

1 May 1919
Old men, young men, boys. Pah! I hate them. They fill me with repulsion.

A strange young thing, skilfully disguised by Nature as a woman!

23 August 1920
The clock has been put back twelve years: I am fourteen, romantic, pedantic, mystery-loving.

17 September 1920
I really don’t like sightseeing. . . . I find that the only thing that keeps my mind off you is danger

13 September 1919
Amor di mia vida, how I long for it all! The sun and the passion of it! I am the world’s most incorrigible vagrant, the world’s worst nomad!

23 February 1920
Ah Julian Julian

I suppose she was afraid of linking her life indissolubly to mine. She had a horror of anything irrevocable.

9 May 1919
It’s that I want you. I want you to the point of frenzy. There are entire days when I think only of that. It’s madness, what you will, but also I’m dying of it. I’m sure that you’ve never suffered so.

29 March 1921
Are you prepared to give me up altogether? That is what I must, what I have every right to know, what I insist on knowing.

19 March 1920
All today I’ve thought of you playing with the children, especially the one who is so like you. But not only like you, like him too. My godchild.

October 1918
Je t’aime – bien plus que tu ne le mérites – et mon amour me tue.

17 September 1920
I really don’t like sightseeing. . . . I find that the only thing that keeps my mind off you is danger

Do you like orchids? I adore them.
You would have the same feelings if you could see them as I do at this moment: meaning, in clusters, purpled, narcotic, with here and there some shameful misalliance as is suitable for plebeian orchids.

22 September 1920
I know I live about four times as intensely as you do; when I am unhappy I am four times as unhappy, when I am jealous I am four times as jealous – you are in pastel what I am in oils.

August 1920
The place is inviolably yours, the lanky, awkward, adorable you that wrote historical novels and had no sense of humour. You have changed more than I have, for I haven’t changed at all.

31 October 1910
And if only your imagination could take it in, you were holding, so to speak, my soul in your hand, you could mould it any way you liked.