Diversely diverting

Saturday, February 23rd., Chiltern Court, London.

Last week, determined to buy a new French book, I went into a large bookshop in Paris, opening and shutting the door with extreme rapidity because of the intense cold. I made the tour of that shop six times, without finding a single book attractive enough to draw money from my pocket. There were plenty of fine old-fashioned works; but either I possessed them, or I had read them, or I positively intend to die without reading them. I noticed that "Maurice" by Constantin Weyer, which has just won the Goncourt Prize was in its hundred and fifteenth thousand, and this fact decided me to deprive myself of it.

Lacking the moral courage to depart without a purchase, I bought "An Anthology of Ronsard and his School" edited by an excellent critic, Auguste Dorchain, and I am now charmed with this book of 500 small pages; it is highly recommendable. At the time I concluded that interesting modern French literature had, for the month, ceased to exist. I was wrong. Two days after my sterile adventure there was published, and I received, an extremely stimulating affair: Paul Leautaud's "Passe-Temps". This book is not merely worth 12 francs, but 12 shillings of the spare cash of any lettered person who can read French. I have performed the act known as 'revelling' in it.

Leautaud, whilst a pillar of the staid Mercure de France, is nevertheless the terrible infant of French literature. He will write down anything that comes into his head. Some of what comes into his head has to be represented by dots. Much is grossly and wilfully unjust. But who minds? Not I at any rate. The present book is made up of sketches, bons mots, remarks, and anecdotes. There is a delicate account of a young stray dog of the female sex who became the mistress of the author's study. He says that for three months he wrote nothing, devoting all his evenings to the contemplation of the animal. She had a gourmand's passion for books and he bestowed on her 20 volumes of the (alleged) poetry of the fecund ballad-monger Paul Fort, and at the rate of three a week she ate them all. Not a leaf was left. "Rarely," says he, "has a literary work been so appreciated." Leautaud's "Pastimes" make a morsel than which nothing more diversely diverting is likely to be published for a long time to come.

It has quite cheered me up.