8 May 1933 – 14 May 1933

Yes, I thought, I will make a note of that face—the face of the woman stitching a very thin, lustrous green silk at a table in the restaurant where we lunched at Vienne. She was like fate—a consummate mistress of all the arts of self-preservation: hair rolled and lustrous; eyes so nonchalant; nothing could startle her; there she sat stitching her green silk with people going and coming all the time; she not looking, yet knowing, fearing nothing; expecting nothing—a perfectly equipped middle class Frenchwoman. At Carpentras last night there was the little servant girl with honest eyes, hair brushed in a flop and one rather black tooth. I felt that life would crush her out inevitably. Perhaps 18, not more; yet on the wheel, without hope; poor, not weak but mastered—yet not enough mastered but to desire furiously travel, for a moment, a car. Ah but I am not rich, she said to me—which her cheap little stockings and shoes showed anyhow. Oh how I envy you, able to travel. You like Carpentras? But the wind blows ever so hard. You’ll come again? That’s the bell ringing. Never mind. Come over here and look at this. No, I’ve never seen anything like it. Ah yes, she always likes the English. (“She” was the other maid, with hair like some cactus in erection.) Yes I always like the English she said. The odd little honest face, with the black tooth, will stay on at Carpentras I suppose: will marry? will become one of those stout black women who sit in the door knitting? No: I foretell for her some tragedy: because she had enough mind to envy us the Lanchester.

Yes, Shelley chose better than Max Beerbohm. He chose a harbour; a bay; and his home, with a balcony, in which Mary stood, looks out across the sea. Sloping sailed boats were coming in this morning—a windy little town, of high pink and yellow southern homes, not much changed I suppose: very full of the breaking of waves, very much open to the sea; and the rather desolate house standing with the sea just in front. Shelley, I suppose, bathed, walked, sat on the beach there; and Mary and Mrs. Williams had their coffee on the balcony. I daresay the clothes and the people were much the same. At any rate, a very good great man’s house in its way. What is the word for full of the sea? Can’t think tonight, sky high in a bedroom at the Nettano in Pisa, much occupied by French tourists. The Arno swimming past with the usual coffee coloured foam. Walked in the cloisters: this is true Italy, with the old dusty smell; people swarming in the streets; under the—what is the word for—I think the word for a street that has pillars is Arcade. Shelley’s house waiting by the sea, and Shelley not coming, and Mary and Mrs. Williams watching from the balcony and then Trelawney coming from Pisa and burning the body on the shore—that’s in my mind. All the colours here are white bluish marble against a very light saturated sky. The tower leaning prodigiously. Clerical beggar at the door in a mock fantastic leather hat. The clergy walking. It was in these cloisters—Campo Santo—that L. and I walked 21 years ago and met the Palgraves and I tried to hide behind the pillars. And now we come in our car; and the Palgraves—are they dead, or very old? Now at any rate we have left the black country: the bald necked vulture country with its sprinkling of redroofed villas. This is the Italy one used to visit in a railway train with Violet Dickinson—taking the hotel bus.

Yes, I am reading—skipping—the Sacred Fount, about the most inappropriate of all books for this din—sitting by the open window, looking across heads and heads and heads—all Siena parading in grey and pink and the cars hooting. How finely run along those involuted threads? I don’t—that’s the answer. I let ‘em break. I only mark that the sign of a masterly writer is his power to break his mould callously. None of H. J.’s timid imitators have the vigour, once they’ve spun their sentence, to smash it. He has some native juice—figure: has driven his spoon deep into some stew of his own—some swarming mixture. That—his vitality—his vernacular—his pounce and grip and swing always spring fresh upon me, if at the same time I ask how could anyone, outside an orchis in a greenhouse, fabricate such an orchid’s dream. Oh these Edwardian ladies with pale hair, these tailored “my dear men”! Yet compared to that vulgar old brute Creevey—L. is here bitten by a flea—H. J. is muscular, lean. No doubt the society of the Regent—the smell of brandy and bones, the painted velvet Lawrence women—the general laxity and lushness and vulgarity are here at their superlative. Of course the Shelleys, the Wordsworths, the Coleridges existed on the other side of the hedge. But when it comes gushing out of Creevey’s page, it’s for all the world like—something between Buckingham Palace, Brighton and the Queen’s own italic style—so uncurbed, so weak: and how can one hope for a cure for a single person? There’s all the dreary Lords and Ladies ogling and overeating; and plush and gilt; and the Princess and the Prince—I think dissolution and obesity taking hold of the eighteenth century and swelling it into a puff ball efflorescence, 1860 is considerably more to the point.