As the correspondence between Alice Rivaz and Jean-Claude Fontanet illustrates so well, friendship is more a matter of encouragement than confiding in one another, about constant trust rather than frequent contact. Twenty years of writing to one another that began when Alice Rivaz reached retirement age and took up writing again after almost fifteen years in abeyance, sheds light on their personalities, their aesthetic approach and their works. Only some of this dialogue remains as, while “sorting and tidying”, Alice Rivaz destroyed most of the letters she had received from her correspondents. Nonetheless, Jean-Claude Fontanet features actively in the novelist’s discourse, recalling memorable moments in the cultural landscape in Geneva and French-speaking Switzerland between the 1960s and the 1980s.