The Shivan Letters: II

"You should buy a rug"

Paris, 26th April 1966
Written on stationery from Hôtel La Louisiane

Dear Mother,

Paris is a spectacle this spring. Even the rain seems decadent and everything feels like it’s been dipped in smoke. The fog over the Seine makes everyone feel like they’re in someone else’s memory. The metro breathes hot air like an animal. That patisserie on Rue Saint-Benoît, La Maison de Lys, still sells the pain au chocolat with the revelatory crunch that you bought me on our first trip here, those many years ago. You should know, my beloved Mother—I’ll never have a croissant under tooth and not think of you.

Even after all this time coming here, Paris hasn’t changed. I suppose that means I have. I find myself speaking less, and noticing more. Even the pigeons here strut with disdain. Perhaps they’ve taken to reading Baudelaire. I walk the same streets, but lately they have a different sheen—like something beneath them has begun to stir. There’s talk of new freedoms, though no one dares name them directly—only that the skirts are shorter, the films more daring, and the air tastes faintly of something unspeakable about to begin.

I’ve been spending my afternoons at the cafés along Rue de Fleurus, watching women with shiny lacquered nails peel oranges over manuscripts, and old men in boiled-wool suits argue over poetry like it’s war.

I suppose I’m one of them now. I’ve taken to the salons—though salon is too grand a word. These are more erratic underground evenings, like shifting interiors with ashtrays. Rooms that rearrange themselves nightly. Parlours filled with professional listeners, where conversations spiral from Rimbaud to alchemy, and theories are tossed into the air like dice—on scent memory, on exile, on the failure of language to keep up with the immediacy of the moment.

Cafe de Flore, Paris, 1960’s

It was Léonie who first brought me. You’d adore her. She’s a woman of extravagant compulsions—dresses like an heiress in mourning with the appetites of a saint on sabbatical. Her wrists clink with Victorian gold and jet, and she drapes antique piano scarves over everything—tables, lamps, occasionally herself. The way she handles champagne, you'd think it was the last tender memory she has of someone, and maybe it is. The harp in her living room is never played, only admired, like some exquisite relic from a life she refuses to explain. All I know is that she was once a dancer, briefly married to a poet, but now drifts between gallery openings and dinner parties with such ease. It’s a marvel. There’s something about her that feels like fate in a costume. A real soul friend.

At one of the recent evenings, in a flat overlooking the canal, I met a man everyone called “the yogi.” No name, just that. Barefoot, unshaven, wearing a linen kurta and a watch far too expensive for the rest of him. (Or at least it appeared that way.) He spoke very little, but when he did, it cut through the haze. Someone was going on about fate and free will in La Jetée, how memory is just a script we keep rehearsing, when the yogi cut in. “You’re starring in a film with no director, mistaking the tracking shot for destiny and the voiceover for God.”

No one knew what to do with that. I laughed. He looked at me, nodded once, and left, leaving behind only his outline in an echo of sandalwood.

Later that evening, I told Léonie I felt like I was waiting for something. She poured more champagne and said, “Then you should buy a rug.” When I asked her what kind, she said, “The kind that tells you who you are when you walk barefoot across it.” She didn’t elaborate. She never does. But I haven’t stopped thinking about it. There’s something about the idea of it that feels... essential. Not decorative. Foundational. Like my spirit needs a place to land.

Léonie de Vauréal, photographed in her Montparnasse flat, 1969.

Tonight I’ll attend a salon in the 11th with someone who claims to read auras. He wears a scarf the color of your smokey lavender house coat and insists no one truly dies, they just stop answering letters. I wish you’d answer mine.

This morning at the flea market, I found a guidebook to North Africa with half the pages missing and the word Tangiers circled ten times in a frenzy. There was a pressed violet between the pages and a cigarette burn in the margin beside the scribbled line: The house allows one to dream in peace. I copied it into my ledger. I don’t know what I’m looking for yet, but something is beginning. I can feel it behind everything.

If I don’t write again, it’s because I’ve followed the violet too far into the margin,

I love you,

Shivan

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Editor’s Note—

Found folded inside a velvet pouch at the base of the carpet bag:
No date. Postmarked Paris. The handwriting reads simply:

To the only woman I’ve ever known who could out-haunt me—
This is not for wearing. But for remembering.
Fasten this to the silence.

—L.

Enclosed with the note: a black cameo brooch, finely carved in jet. The figure depicted is not immediately identifiable—possibly Persephone, possibly a veiled woman with eyes closed. The clasp is intact, but the pin bears no hallmark. There is no mention of the sender elsewhere in the archive, though the tone and paper match other known letters from Léonie de Vauréal.

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If you’re new to this series, read the first installment here: