I wrote over 3000 words of my last Windsor story, dined at a nice Duval in the Parc du Champs de Mars, smoked a cigar at the Globe, and then went to the Theatre Antoine and saw Ibsen's "Ghosts". This is not after all a good play. It is vitiated by the symbolism of the asylum. The defect, fatal defect, of the play is that it is too 'stagey'. It has not the air of being quite sincere. It is too clever. All this I can see quite clearly. There are moments in the first and second acts however which are poignantly dramatic.Also "La Paix Chez-soi", a new one act piece by Georges Courteline. Very good, funny, and at the same time bitterly true, in its essence, to real life. How such an idea would have been ruined by sentimentality in an English play. But I think that I could write a play as good. I returned home after 12, and after reaching my etage dropped my box of matches, which fell right down the well of the stairs to the bottom. How I cursed! I had to go down and find them. Vile weather.
Somehow I got to thinking of Oscar Wilde whilst I was out and about today. It is only three years since he died here in Paris. I might well have met him had dissipation and the effects of imprisonment not taken their toll. How would we have got on? Well of course he was a toff so probably not very well. Not that I have anything against toffs, so long as they are only toffish in private and with other consenting adults. In fact I know little of Wilde's life but my sense is that, whilst he didn't deserve to be imprisoned, he was the author of his own destiny. No doubt attitudes to homosexuality will change in time but it is unwise to balatantly disregard public mores however much you despise them personally.
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