Jaded

Thursday, February 24th., Hotel Bristol, Paris.

We walked along the Rue du Faubourg St. Honore. Lovely shops. Beautifully arranged. Marvellously arranged. This fact strikes me more and more. You may wander afar off to see old quaint quarters of Paris; but they are not more artistic than these modern shops in the middle of the much-despised modern shopping Anglo-American quarter. Well, we went into Hermes, and were very well served by a young man, and we bought a hand-bag for Dorothy, price 1,000 francs. Dorothy didn't want me to pay so much; or at least she protested that I was over-indulgent. But the bag really affected my feelings, and she would certainly have been disappointed in me had I not bought it for her.

I read in Paul Morand's "Rien que la Terre". This book does not seem to me to be anything remarkable - at best you might call it remarkably bright, variegated journalism. This is the last of the six French books which I bought in Paris on the day we left for Cortina. I have now read or sampled them all. The best is certainly Aragon's "Paysan de Paris". I gave it to the Aldous Huxleys. De Castellane's "Comment j'ai Decouvert l'Amerique" is very interesting and alive for the most part, and contains a few rather profound things. But on the whole I haven't read anything really startling since we left England.

I begin to doubt whether I am in fact very fond of reading. I always look forward to reading. But the realisation is rarely satisfactory. I soon tire of it. I don't know what to make of this state of affairs. Books have been the only consistent love of my life. I think it must be a temporary problem, probably resulting from the pressure to read so as to construct my weekly column for the Standard. I need to give myself a holiday from 'professional' reading and get back to reading for pleasure. I have an idea to make a list of my twenty favourite books (which won't be easy to do) and then to re-read them. That will do the trick.

It has been a beautiful day. Blue sky. No wind. Distictly warm in the sun. We were able to apricate in the hotel grounds. Lovely word that - I picked it up from the Manchester Guardian earlier this week. I do like to add new words to my vocabulary, and to use them. To be honest I have a tendency to overuse them until the novelty wears off.