Henri to Yvette.

650 Gen Tpt Coy
Italy

22 March

A letter praising the beautiful Italian spring, whose first signs penetrate my heart with longing and desire for you. The earth has become green again, red and violet, the sky blue and the beautiful sea; these beauties carry me irresistibly to the beauty of your soul and your body, My love, my pining my desire….I’ve told you so often that I love you.. Let me tell you again…. As I write this letter, everything has disappeared. A strange night has fallen over the world. Vesuvius is angry. It weeps lava. Though it’s daytime I am writing to you with electric light. Outside everything is black. For long and lugubrious hours it is raining great chunks of lava, which fall from the sky and cover the earth with a blackness that causes anguish in men’s hearts. And there, so near to the mountain the mass of fire advances- a red avalanche- majestic, irresistible. Cruel. It wipes out and burns, devastating fields and villages. It destroys and entombs.” Country ravaged by passions of men, by hunger and hideous speculators, now the ravages of Vesuvius in 1944 to add to its miseries. What limits will they know now, these gentlemen speculators?  Destruction is devastating. ….I must stop. Work calls me.”