Belle da Costa Greene, letter to Bernard Berenson, 22 September 1911, pp. 19–20. Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers, Box 610 Folder 20. Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
[p. 19]
you remember the Evening
at Claridges when you
read Keats + Shelley +
French verses to me—I
think of it—that evening—
every time I read any
Baudelaire—
“Mère des souvenirs— .. 1
B.B. I would rather have
you read to me than Jean
[p. 20]
de Reske [sic] sing—you
read beautifully daarrling—
I must run now + get
some one of these million
things off my table—
Don’t stop writing to me
daarrling for a day—“I
have been faithful to
thee, Cynara, in my fashion.”2
And I love you + love you
+ love you “in my fashion”
Yours Belle—
- The opening phrase of Charles Baudelaire’s “Le Balcon” (The Balcony), from his Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857).
- Line from Ernest Dowson’s poem “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae” (1896).