"I don't understand how I could have separated myself from you. I am just like this! It is my lamentable nature. If you didn't love me I would die, you love me and here you have me writing to you that enough is enough. I am repulsed by my own imbecility." That is how passionate and forceful Gustave Flaubert (Rouen, 1821 - Canteleu, 1880) sounded when, at 25 years old, he communicated by letter with Louise Colet, the great love of his life. Eleven years older than the future writer, married and mother of a girl, Colet began a relationship with Flaubert that lasted for almost a decade and grew above all at a distance, thanks to the correspondence that the two authors sent each other.

"Dear Mercè: it has been a long time since we heard from you. What are you doing? Where are you? How are you? [...] As you can see I am [sic] in La Molina where I am taking a rest cure of chilling". This is the postcard that the painter and pedagogue Susina Amat i Juvé (Barcelona, 1912-1983) sent on July 20, 1971, from the Catalan Pyrenees, to Mercè Rodoreda (Barcelona, 1908 - Girona, 1983), whom she had become friends with when they worked at the Propaganda Commissariat of the Generalitat, in the middle of the Civil War. The author, who at that time was finalizing one of her most emblematic novels, Broken mirror (1974), he replied to her from Vienna three weeks later to let her know about the difficult time he was going through: "I have been [sic] in Vienna for about four months, where a person very dear to me is dying little by little after a couple of brain surgeries".