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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume I

Wednesday le midi — November 19, 1919

Wednesday le midi
November 19, 1919

A most beautiful man has just been here to put the lock on the door—really a superb creature. He could not put the lock on the door so he spent his time explaining (1) how easy it would be for a person to come in at night: (2) how unpleasant; (3) how much wiser to trouver quelqu'un to sleep here seulement pour la bien garder. Just give them a morceau de paille in the vestibule and the thing is done. Locking the horse in the stable en pension, so to say.

It has not been cold to-day—temperate air. The result is I am a different child. I've been out for a walk and I'm tingling with warmth and my bones don't ache half so much and my lungs open and shut. The cold really paralyses me: I went to bed last evening and felt in despair about it. First one couldn't work because of moustiques and moucherons. Then because of L. M., then because of the cold—a sliding scale. But when the day is fair one forgets. I climbed about the hill at the back of the Casetta. After you get up a certain height there's a perfect little promenade—quite flat, only used by the sauterelles, full of gay small flowers and insects. Below are pines and the sun shining through them makes them smell sweetly. I was so happy there. I thought how much more my kind these little boulevardiers were—the butterflies, the grasshoppers and the daisies—than the crowd at Mentone, par example. How much lovelier to look at the wild thyme and the tiny honeysuckle than the shop fronts. I stayed up there (like M. Séguin's goat, I felt) all the morning, and below ever so far as I came round a bend I saw the Casetta with its foreshortened geranium bushes, looking a jewel. Just as I left I said out aloud: Thank you very much, it's been lovely—But to whom? To the Lord who gave me consumption?

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Just then lunch was ready—curried pasta, fresh bread, marmelade de pommes and dried figs and coffee. L. M. is off to San Remo to buy oatmeal and ‘have a little look at the shops.’ So I shall write my review of Monkhouse and Stern and Stevenson. The sun has gone, clouds have pulled over—soft grey ones with silver fringes—the wind is piping. Of course, the locksmith man said they had never had such a year as this year. The flowers are nearly spoiled with the gêlée, and snow on all the mountains…. Why do these things follow us? Wherever I go they never have known such a year. I take back my Thank you….

I have a suspicion that Eliot is finding himself as a poet in his analysis (not quite the word) of caricature. I feel he is seeing why he fails, and how he can separate himself from Sweeney through Sweeney. But this may be sadly far-fetched.