The correspondence between Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau explores 48 years of a complex and tormented artistic friendship. Through their letters, the story of a talent and a genius unfolds, a unique story that sweeps across the artistic and political spectrum of some fifty years of the 20th century: cubism, Russian ballets, Guernica, the Occupation and the purge, Dora Maar, Jean Marais, Cocteau's film poetry, Picasso's ceramics and the Mediterranean sky. Correspondences are fragments of life, seized in the body of the greater History. They illuminate the interior landscape of an era, through a kaleidoscope of archives and voices: History reveals itself in its most intimate light. For centuries we have written to give news, to exchange ideas, to express love or pain, to tell each other about the world we live in. Letters are the memory of the world, fragments of life seized in the body of the greater History. What does the correspondence of Picasso at the height of creation reveal? That of Renoir seeking the American dream in Hollywood? The answers to the blankpages of History lie at the heart of these letters, in the vitality of such exchanges.