An ordeal

Good Friday, April 17th., Les Sablons.

On Wednesday we went to Paris to prepare for the removing. Yesterday I went twice to the Foire du Jambon, and bought a few frames and two tiny coloured panels. Returned home in crowded 5.15 exhausted. Particularly Marguerite. Perhaps for the first time she felt that the country was better than the town. This morning I went over to the house, on foot. Marguerite came by train and had her first sight of the house. Ordeal passed off very well, as everything was in order. This afternoon I wrote a T.P.W. article. No mistake my control over my brain steadily increases.

Additionally for April 17th., see 'Roman Easter'

I also drove up to the Garibaldi Monument (Monte Gianicolo). All this in two hours. I did not feel like lunching wholesale in the hotel, so I went out and found a littletrattoria, and ate there. About a dozen customers. Two clerkly young men with gay neckties, in confidential discussion. A group of three: an oldish, shabby, tousled woman with back so bowed that her head was almost at the level of the table; an old man, her husband with a hooked nose, very shabby and untidy, who smoked small cheap cigars the whole time; and a chocolate-uniformed friend who looked like a sleeping-car conductor but was not. The hooked nose and the chocolate person argued incessantly and raspingly; but they were excellent friends; the chocolate person felt the old man's pulse and the glands of his neck, and sneered, while the old woman grinned and steadily ate.