An agreeable day

Saturday, April 2nd., Hotel Bellini, Milan.

We left the Hotel Belvedere on Easter Sunday. I wrote 3 articles and 11,000 words of my novel during our seven clear days in Switzerland.

We found the Rhone valley less tedious than we had expected and the Simplon shorter. And the customs quite harmless. It was very hot as soon as we got fairly into Italy, really hot. The views of the Italian lakes came up to our hopes. This hotel is a good staging post, dominated by Germans, not agreeable fellow-travellers and it's no use pretending that they are. There is also a school group of young girls in the hotel, chiefly Germans seeing cities during the Easter holidays. Their laughter, heard occasionally from the interior of bedrooms was very agreeable, in fact rather erotic if I am honest. For a man of vivid imagination a party of young girls, just on the edge of womanhood, is stirring.

National characters. Are they real, or are they observed because we look out for examples to reinforce our preconceptions. I think the latter.

After tea Marguerite and I went into the town. Took a tram. Quite an adventure taking a tram in an absolutely strange town where you can't speak the language. The cathedral is impressive though you can see at once that it is meretricious in many respects. We saw it in a grand afternoon light that really did 'flood' it. Almost tangible, as if you could roll it around in your hands. The place is prodigious and iot seemed to be on fire with orange yellow streams of light. We couldn't see any chairs. The whole floor space lookd empty. Then after a time we saw a squad of 500 or 1,000 chairs which we had missed in the vast arena. The Victor Emmanuel gallery and Arcade also pleased us. 

Marguerite was ravished, enchanted by everything; said all the women were very pretty etc., all this because the atmosphere reminded her of her midi. We walked about until she was nearly dead. But the stimulating effect persisted as I discovered when we got back to our room in the hotel. I shall have to seek out such stimulation more often!

Auguste Foa, my translator, came to see me after dinner. Young man, 32, dark, slim, hat on one side, very sympathetic and agreeable. He told me some depressing things about Italian literature. He said all his literary articles only brought him in £40 a year. I shall put some of his facts into the New Age.