Do you know Ruth María Pascual? And do you know Georges Pasquier, Jojo? Do you know Jeanne Planche, la Jeanne?

All are personal friends of artists.

And what it is to be the friend of an artist! You are no longer as you see yourself from the mirror, nor even as you imagine yourself from the most intimate depth of your soul, you are almost as your mother sees you. You become, quite literally, a glimpse of how God knows you. You become a fragment of the Universe, you are revealed in ways that none others than God and the artist know how to perambulate.

Jojo was one of Jacques Brel's closest friend, also his manager and chauffeur, who died in 1974. When Brel himself was dying, in 1977, he wrote one of his most tortured album, Les Marquises, one song of which was Jojo, a tribute to his prematurely departed friend who died at 50 and whom he knew he would soon rejoin in their common fate of untimely death to cancer:

Jeanne Planche was Georges Brassens's landlady, although the term is not appropriate, more like his salvation, when he came to Paris. She possibly had been his mistress although being much older than him, an hypothesis fueled by the exaggerated passion between the two. She was, in any case, a very strong, direct and personal bond to the rebellious anarchist, who took so great affection for this motherly figure that only poetry is left for biographers and admirers of this unique musician:

Ruth María Pascual is also an artist, whom Elena met in a common clase de Canto, where they were studying the art of composition. Elena wrote a song (Copla a Ruth) on her muse-mate which obsesses me for the same lamentation that one gets strangled with, from the texts of the great masters, when they write and sing about those they love. Even in a blink of an eye, it seems the connection is universal:

This reminds me of Orwell's opening to Homage to Catalonia where he describes the immediate liking he took for a militiaman standing there in the barrack before officers studying a map:

Queer, the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hoped he liked me as well as I liked him. But I also knew that to retain my first impression of him I must not see him again; and needless to say I never did see him again.

—George Orwell, 1st page to Homage to Catalonia.

I never met Ruth, but I often listen to her song. Maybe like Orwell's intuition that the first impression should—in some cases where too much balances on so fragile foundations—be the last one, Ruth quickly left the class. Elena asked her if she could put her song on her actuation of another piece, which Ruth kindly agreed to. This is now for the rest of us to experience, how others, how people look like, when they are contemplated by great artists.