Endless brooding

Tuesday, December 15th., Chiltern Court, London.

 

I have a tendency to nostalgia at this time of year. I suppose it is to do with the year nearing its end, and the short days, and the distant hope of Spring. And when I get nostalgic it is usually for France as I experienced it all those years ago. I never feel nostalgic about the Potteries!

 

When I lived in the Rue de Calais I never knew anything about the prodigiously genteel house of which I rented a fragment, except that a retired opera singer lived over my head, and a pianoforte professor at the Conservatoire somewhere under my feet. I never saw either of them, but I knew that the ex-opera singer received about a yard of bread every morning and about one and a half litres of milk. 

 

Every afternoon and sometimes in the evening a distant violin used to play, very badly, six bars - no more - of an air of Verdi's over and over again; never any other tune! The sound was too faint to annoy me, but it was the most melancholy thing I have ever heard. This phenomenon persisted for months, and I never discovered its origin, though I inquired again and again. Some interior, some existence of an infinite monotonous sadness was at hand, and yet hidden away from me, inviolate. Whenever I hear, or imagine I hear, that air now I am instantly in Paris, and as near being sentimental as ever I shall be.

 

My ambition had long been to inhabit the Rue d'Aumale - austere, silent, distinguished, icy and beautiful - and by hazard I did ultimately obtain a flat there, and so left the Rue de Calais. But I missed the undiscoverable and tragic violin of the Rue de Calais. To this day the souvenir of it will invariably fold me in a delicious spleen. The secret life of cities is a matter for endless brooding.

 

It is interesting to me that I deliberately 'broke' from Paris and went to live in the provinces, to see what they were like, to understand a little the fabric of the backbone of France. This coincided with my marriage. But I often desired to be back again in Paris, and of course, in the end, I went back. And then I had the delightful sensation of coming back to the city not as a starnger, but as one versed in its deviousness. I was able to take up at once the threads that I had dropped, or at least those compatible with a married state, without any of the drudgery and tedium incident to one's first social studies of a foreign capital. I was immediately at home, and I never felt more satisfaction in my citizenship of Paris than at this time. It was also at this period that I carried my Parisianism as far as I am ever likely to carry it.