BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [30 OCT. 1916]
BRACERS 19069. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

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57 Gordon Square,1
London. W.C.
In the train.2
Monday.3

My Beloved

Your letter4 was at the P.O. this morning when I called. It gave me great joy. I feel unutterably one with you now — quite infinitely more than before — I feel we are together in the adventure and the danger of life — and in the search. I can give now far more freely. I love you with all my soul, and I want all good things for you — not soft things, but the real good things that are tempered in the central fire. “This world was always and ever will be an ever-living fire”5 says Heraclitus — he says Souls are compounded of fire and water, and the best are those in which fire has the largest proportion. My dear one, I have the sense of strange infinite voyages to make with you — journeys to unknown lands of thought and feeling — to hopes undreamed and deep terrors overcome. I want you so much — I long to be with you — to be alive with you — but I feel your spirit with me very close. I do want long days with you in wild places — where the spirit exults and ecstasy flows through one’s veins.

I am glad you were able to tell Miles.6

Read the scenes in the heath in King Lear7 if you don’t know them by heart. They mean a great deal to me.

I believe you have never really loved before — not to the depths of your being — for if you had you must have known what came to you Friday night.8 All great feeling is mixed with agony — an agony one would not be without — a something tearing and rending — the God breaking through the integuments of flesh. My dear one, I am yours, utterly.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200036.

• 2

  In the train. Colette noted: “Presumably train between Harrogate and London.”

• 3

  [date] Colette wrote “30 Oct. 1916” on the letter.

• 4

  Your letter Of 29 October 1916, BRACERS 112954.

• 5

  “This world was always and ever will be an ever-living fire” Heraclitus, fragment DK22B30.

• 6

  able to tell Miles In her letter of 28 October 1916 (BRACERS 112953), she had written to BR that she had told her husband, Miles, of their relationship. The couple had an open marriage, and Miles was involved with a young woman identified only as “G”. With this confession completed, Colette wrote that she felt “utterly one with you now, not only as lovers but in an almost deeper way.”

• 7

  scenes in the heath in King Lear III.iii, iv; IV.i. Some of Lear’s lines on the heath are quoted by BR in “The Psychoanalyst’s Nightmare”, Nightmares of Eminent Persons (1954); others are in “Disgust and Its Antidote” (1957; 16d in Papers 29: 86–7).

• 8

  Friday night 27 October 1916.