« Only your heart will be able to read this letter because I myself have trouble deciphering it, I'm out of ink, I had to spit in our inkwell to make some... isn't that a joke? »
Thérèse to Céline, letter 142
In the Carmel, we only bought ink for big projects. Thus Céline occasionally bought Indian ink, but the usual procedure was to make her own ink. Basically, it involves dissolving dyes of various origins (organic, vegetable, mineral - today chemical) in a solvent.
Recipe for making ink
Put in the sun in a pitcher or on hot ashes, one month or 6 weeks, taking care to stir often with a fig stick (?):
4 pints rain or river water
Green couperose ½ pound
gall nuts black good spicy and crushed [??] ½ pound
Alum of rock 6 ounces
After that, i.e. after six weeks add:
Vitriol chi...? 3 ounces
Rock candy well crushed 4 ounces
Gum arabic finely crushed 6 ounces
Stir and leave for another 8 or ten days in the fire or in the sun. The sun is better. You have to stir every day.
Another recipe for making ink
more prompt and commonly used
Blackest, shiny ground gall nut possible ½ pound
Gum arabic 3 ounces
Couperose 4 ounces
½ ounce common rock sugar
Put everything in a vase full of well sealed soil.
Add two liters of water and boil for one hour, always stirring.
Then pass through a cloth or sieve.
Some definitions :
La green couperose is iron sulfate.
The galls are pests of oak.
pinch to arrange, to trim (eg nuts). Derived from clamp.
What used to be called the vitriol is sulfuric acid, a corrosive industrial chemical, which has very many applications.
Moon was known from Roman antiquity, in the dyeing of materials.
La gum arabic is solidified sap, amalgamated on the trunk and at the foot of the acacias. Gum arabic is commercially available in the form of powder or crystals. Odorless and water soluble.
