Charming Violence

Tuesday, February 20th., Rue de Calais, Paris.

Opera masked ball on Saturday night. The Atkinses supped with me at the Place Blanche. We got to the restaurant too soon, and found all the waiters asleep in odd corners, and the room darkened. It was like going into an enchanted palace. We woke it up, and lighted it up, in an instant. By the time we left, 12.30, there was a noisy band playing and a crowd of guests.

We got to the ball at 12.45. Already an enormous crowd. Great cohorts of men in silk hats. I should say the men outnumbered the women by 5 to 1. The people who looked really well were the chorus girls etc. from the Opera who were thoroughly used to fancy dress and knew how to walk and how to dine.. Outside these and a few professional men, there was almost no fancy dress; but plenty of dominoes. The coup d'oeil in the salle was superb, and the orchestras (3) fine and deafening, as they ought ot be.

There was, relatively, very little dancing. Not a single well-bred Frenchwoman there, so far as I could see, and very few toilettes worth a damn. But the general effect was dazzlingly immense. And the cohorts of men, all on the lookout for 'something nice', seemed to lurch from time to time in one direction or another, as crowds do, bodily, and sometimes even to stampede. There was something undignified in these masses of masculinity. The waiters and ouvreuses seemed politer and gayer than usual. We left at 3.15. Many people had preceded us. It was an experience, one I shall remember in years to come when I look back on my time in Paris which, I can feel already, coming towards its end. It seems to me that Paris has acquired such a reputation for 'gaiety' that its denizens feel obliged to act up to it, whether that is their natural inclination or not. It is a sort of communal hysteria which someone like me is not easily caught up in.

Needless to say that I was a wreck on Sunday, and the noises of the people in the flat above got on my nerves even more than usual. As suspected the concierge has taken no action on my behalf. However I wrote a brief account of the ball for the Standard, rather sardonic, and took it down to the office. 

T.P. O'Connor dined with me last night. He still slanged Sargent, and he said that Renoir was a master. In literature, with his usual charming violence, he cursed Conrad's style (very cleverly) and was enthusiastic about Thackeray. We came back here and went through a lot of my books. He proved himself at once a fairly accomplished bookman. But late in the evening, when we were talking about religion, Malthusianism, etc. I discovered that in some matters his ideas were a strange mixture of crudity and fineness. He is certainly a unique character, and something of a minor deity in Liverpool.