AustLit

'The ‘Raymond’ who sends his tender thoughts is Raymond Roussel, the French poet, playwright and novelist. And ‘little Charlotte’ is Charlotte Dufrène, Roussel’s housekeeper and closest friend (after his mother, Mme. Marguerite Roussel, who had died some years before the postcard was penned). Based on the colour photograph, ‘showing a street of an extremely modern town, with fine buildings and a tramline’, Roussel’s biographer François Caradec has imagined that his hotel room overlooked Collins Street, its northern windows faced away from Melbourne’s city centre (Caradec 175). Yet this is a double fabrication, not only because little was known about the poet’s visit to Australia in 1920 – where he went, where he stayed, what he saw – but also because the postcard itself exists only in reproduction, described and transcribed by the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, with Dufrène’s permission, in an essay titled ‘Le Voyageur et son Ombre’ (‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’) published in 1935, two years after Roussel’s death.' (Introduction)