In fact, the couple were all too separable. You don’t get 1,200 pages’ worth of billets without their recipients being at least a few kilometres apart.

“LOVE LETTERS straight from your heart / Keep us so near while apart …” Whether you prefer Nat King Cole or Elvis Presley singing that Victor Young classic, it plays on an endless mental loop while you’re reading this whopping great collection of billets-doux. The romance between the writer Albert Camus and the actress Maria Casarès lasted 15-and-a-half years, from July 1944 through to Camus’ early death in January 1960. Over that time, they exchanged some 865 letters. Averaged out, that’s a fraction more than a letter a week. Read your way through the book, though, and it can seem they’re writing a letter every hour. This affair had its ups and downs, but its passion never cooled.

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