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LES ECHOS

Why The World Still Needs Love Letters - And Not Just On Valentine's Day

Has technology made love letters obsolete? Not quite. Old-fashioned epistles take time to write and send. But in these days of nearly instantaneous communication, that “delightful delay” – and the thought that goes into it – may be just the thing to set h

A street artist's adaptation of a 'love letter box' in Paris (Daquella manera)
A street artist's adaptation of a "love letter box" in Paris (Daquella manera)
Mélina Gazsi

PARIS -- On March 7, 1833, a young woman received a note from a man she had met a few months before: "I love you, my poor angel, you know it well, and yet you want me to write it. But you are right: One has to love, and then one has to say it, and then write it ... "The young woman in question was Juliette Drouet. The man who wrote the letter was Victor Hugo, who would go on to shower his mistress, a young French actress, with hundreds of such epistles.

Anne-Sophie Moutier, 23, is not yet that prolific a writer. But since this past November, when her boyfriend first went off to military school, she too has discovered the joys of "letter" writing. Granted, many of her correspondences involve e-mails and text messages. Not all, however. Anne-Sophie and her boyfriend sometimes write real, handwritten letters. The old-fashioned kind. "Nothing can replace a love letter," she says. "The phone is not enough and when you write, you can say things that may sound a little cheesy when said aloud."

Is Anne-Sophie a big romantic? Well, she's in love, at any rate. As is her fiancé. Before leaving for his training camp, he slips one of Anne-Sophie's letters underneath his shirt, "close to his heart." Are they being too lovey-dovey? Is their candor bordering on naiveté? Not at all. According to Philippe Brenot, a psychiatrist and president of the International Observatory of Couples, love letters are part of the romantic discourse and are "of considerable importance."

"Love letters are the place where confidences are made," he says. "They remain a powerful means of expressing one's feelings and one's desire – of declaring one's love, breathing life into it at the beginning of a relationship, and even allowing to rekindle the flame when love seems to be waning."

"With the telephone and with the arrival of new technologies, love letters almost disappeared," Brenot adds. "But actually, they've become unique, because time adds value. The time you take to write a letter, the time it takes for it to reach its recipient, and the time the latter takes to read it." It's hard to argue with the fact too that a handwritten letter, all alone in a mailbox full of flyers and bills, has a certain cachet.

"A delightful delay"

Are love letters still pertinent in this modern era, when sexual relations are no longer so taboo and elusive and when hardly anyone courts anymore? "More than ever!" says Roger Schembri, a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who says love letters provide a "delightful delay."

"It's always been easier to write down feelings than to say them aloud. Especially nowadays, at a time when people find it easier to say ‘I want to have sex with you" than ‘I love you,"" he says. Love letters, Roger Schembri goes on to say, "deliver a fragment of a dream we all want to believe in."

It would seem, in other words, that the new means of communication haven't killed off love letters after all. For Joëlle-Andrée Deniot, a sociology professor at the University of Nantes, "Internet, Facebook and Twitter have rather encouraged letters'. And the youth, although addicted to all things virtual, is no exception to the rule. Young people express their feelings using all media, from paper to parchment, from Post-it notes to postcards, via text messages and e-mails. Their creativity knows no bounds.

The letter we receive, the one that bears the signature of our beloved, is as sensual and carnal as the expression of desire itself. Writing is like an extension of oneself. "It's like a caress, like a reassuring kiss," says Abiwen Josiane, 48.

Sometimes the person we are writing to is far away, or is leaving us for good. In those cases the act of writing can be a way to escape pain and sorrow, or a way to help us better understand our own feelings, to really discover what it is that's turning us upside down. "When I realized I would never see her again, I decided to write her the most beautiful love letter ever," says Jérémie Franc de Ferriere, 27.

A love letter definitely contains this fragment of dream we're all looking for, to protect us from the world's hardships and from our own turbulent times. At the same time it can give meaning to our sexuality, helping sort out that complicated but exciting rush of pleasure and feelings.

Read more from Le Monde in French

Photo – Daquella manera

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Society

Genoa Postcard: A Tale Of Modern Sailors, Echos Of The Ancient Mariner

Many seafarers are hired and fired every seven months. Some keep up this lifestyle for 40 years while sailing the world. Some of those who'd recently docked in the Italian port city of Genoa, share a taste of their travels that are connected to a long history of a seafaring life.

A sailor smokes a cigarette on the hydrofoil Procida

A sailor on the hydrofoil Procida in Italy

Daniele Frediani/Mondadori Portfolio via ZUMA Press
Paolo Griseri

GENOA — Cristina did it to escape after a tough breakup. Luigi because he dreamed of adventures and the South Seas. Marianna embarked just “before the refrigerator factory where I worked went out of business. I’m one of the few who got severance pay.”

To hear their stories, you have to go to the canteen on Via Albertazzi, in Italy's northern port city of Genoa, across from the ferry terminal. The place has excellent minestrone soup and is decorated with models of the ships that have made the port’s history.

There are 38,000 Italian professional sailors, many of whom work here in Genoa, a historic port of call that today is the country's second largest after Trieste on the east coast. Luciano Rotella of the trade union Italian Federation of Transport Workers says the official number of maritime workers is far lower than the reality, which contains a tangle of different laws, regulations, contracts and ethnicities — not to mention ancient remnants of harsh battles between shipowners and crews.

The result is that today it is not so easy to know how many people sail, nor their nationalities.

What is certain is that every six to seven months, the Italian mariner disembarks the ship and is dismissed: they take severance pay and after waits for the next call. Andrea has been sailing for more than 20 years: “When I started out, to those who told us we were earning good money, I replied that I had a precarious life: every landing was a dismissal.”

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