Monstrous mementos

Thursday, November 2nd., 4 Rue de Calais, Paris.

"Carmen" on Tuesday night with J.D. I thought it as fine as ever.

Montmartre Cemetery

Yesterday was All Saints Day, and I walked in the Montmartre Cemetery. It was rather like a City of the Dead. Certainly as much a relic of barbarism as anything one is likely to see in Paris, with its tons of flowers and ugly wreaths ornamenting the most deplorable monuments and houses of corpses. Vast crowds of people, many in black, but not all. Many, if not most, out for an airing: moonstruck crowds before certain monstrous mementos of surpassing vulgarity. A very few women here and there with moist eyes. A file of soldiers (seasoned) at the gates, made to supply the absence of an iron railing to separate incoming from outgoing crowds - and naturally looking stupid. Also policemen and officials. in the street flowershops and stalls, and wreath shops and stalls and quantities of cabs. Unavoidable not to contemplate one's own mortality in such a setting, or at least one's final resting place. I think I should like Burslem Cemetery best, somewhere near the Longsons. Just a simple headstone with my name, dates and the word "Author". That would be enough.

M D Calvocoressi

Last evening I went to Calvocoressi's and met Vignes the pianist, an extraordinary enthusiast for Russian music and an exceedingly fine player. The two first played a duet and then Vignes had the piano to himself. What struck me was the fine pure quality of the pleasure we obtained, all of us, the simplicity of the enthusiasm; and yet what years of cultivation had gone to provide it, in all of us. Calvocoressi's mother sat upright, on an ordinary cane chair, half blind with cataract, and encouraged our enthusiasm. I expressed my pleasure. "Mais croyez-vous que nous ne sommes pas heureux comme tout, tous les quatres!" said Calvocoressi, his face beaming.

Ricardo Vignes

Vignes, having played a piece, would usually turn back the pages to find some particular passage and would end by playing the whole thing again. When explaining the beauties of passages while he played them he became quite incomprehensible to me, what with his bad accent and his rapidity. Yes, what struck me as I came away was the singular 'purity' of it all, the absence of sex, of anything in the nature of an aftertaste. It reminded me of fine musical evenings in London.
Sadly, later, it also reminded me of the lack of success of "Sacred and Profane Love" - perhaps I was too influenced by my own response to great piano playing, and overdid my heroine's 'enthusiasm'.