“Through all the lightening of the baggage I have kept my books,” he wrote Belle. “It means a lot to go to a quiet place to read the poems that we both like, and those that I always associate with you.” The poems were from The Oxford Book of French Verse. Besides this volume and The Oxford Book of English Verse, the rest of Kermit’s books were written in Portuguese—with the notable exception of his copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey, which were in the original Greek.
