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a close up of a piece of paper with writing on it
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Estimate €1,000 - €1,200
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Description
MERMOZ Jean L.A.S. ‘Jean’, Natal, 21 June 1930, to his ‘Beloved Mum’; 4 pages on tissue paper, sent via Aéropostale (the edge of the last folio is slightly frayed). Futile attempts to get the Comte de La Vaulx seaplane airborne again after crossing the South Atlantic. He hopes his mother’s leg is better, and that he will find her “able to stand on her toes like a prima ballerina!!”… His mother has met her son’s fiancée: “So… have you met my little Gilberte?? Doesn’t she deserve to be loved as much as I love her??”… “And in the meantime, I’m champing at the bit in this dreary little backwater of Natal. I’m bored to death. What a nightmare!! On top of that, a few bouts of mild fever, which certainly don’t help to balance out the low spirits and frayed nerves of the last few days… Thirty-three attempts to set off between 8 and 11 June. I was in tears of helplessness. I’m not used enough to giving up, to resigning myself, to not succeeding. I finally manage to sort things out for the next post. I cycle three hundred kilometres along the coast to find a suitable spot. I find a superb lake 60 km from Natal inland… I organise everything… and then disaster strikes!! Departure banned due to reinforcements… in short, utter nonsense. Laurent Eynac got a proper telling-off, oh! admittedly with tact and respect… but… it made Daurat very happy!! So now, knowing Gilberte is on the other side in Paris, having to hurt her yet again with these constant disappointments, whilst you’re suffering and back in Paris too, my spirits have sunk… sunk. I drag my sadness and my idleness through the dirty, dreary streets of Natal… and the days and hours drag on endlessly’. There’s only one wretched hotel: ‘the rooms have no ceilings; it rains in just as much as outside; the beds are full of bedbugs; ants are taking up residence and tearing down the walls. So my navigator, my radio operator and I have moved into an unfurnished villa, though it’s as clean as a Brazilian house can be. We’ve each bought a hammock to sleep in, petrol drums to serve as wardrobes, chairs and a table, a Brazilian lad to cook for us, and an old, rattling Chevrolet that clatters us down into town… we’re not denying ourselves anything. […] In short, it’s a proper shanty town and a right mess in every sense of the word!! ” And he has ‘a staggering amount of correspondence’, 20 to 30 letters with every post, from all over the world: stamp collectors, soldiers, ‘young girls asking me to take them away – especially American girls from Miami in Florida’… We’ve included another handwritten letter ‘Jean’ to his mother (4 pp. in-8 on Via Aéropostale paper): he writes little and ‘with his mind numb, in a dazing half-sleep. The weather here at the moment is exhausting, with constant tropical downpours and sweltering heat. Everyone has been ill. Even I, who’d managed to avoid it, had three days of fever in Buenos Aires, where I’d stopped off between two mail runs […] I was deeply saddened by Baptiste’s death […] yet he died a marvellous death in the prime of his youth… whilst still dreaming… he was too good, too handsome, too pure to deserve to suffer from all the filth of the world… It is very sad for those he leaves behind and who loved him. I shall go to see his mother as soon as I return; that will be the first visit I wish to make’… Also enclosed are two postcards signed ‘Jean’ to his mother (one folio in-8 each on Via Aéropostale paper). Provenance: - Jean Mermoz (1901–1936); - Gabrielle Gillet-Mermoz (1880–1955); - Then passed down through the family
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About the sale Historical Memories
Auction location
Auction time 11/03/2026 at 11:00 AM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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