Prowling round

Monday, March 16th., Villa des Nefliers, Avon S/M.

Worried about the finances of Fontainebleau lately. Still I kept myself in hand very well until the moment arrived last night for me to receive a crucial letter from Pinker. I had given him carte blanche to dispose of "Buried Alive" exactly as he thought best, and had made it clear that my priority was more money! The letter was handed to me in a dark street. I had some difficulty not stopping to read it under a gas lamp. I read it at the station with a commendable show of nonchalance, though nobody there had the least interest in me or my business. Strange the compulsion to 'perform' even when there is no audience. It was alright. No mistake, the constant practice of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus has had its gradual effect on me.

Have never worked better than these last few days. 4,000 words of "The Old Wives' Tale" in three days plus two articles and some verse. And I have a general scheme of a long article on the London theatrical situation. And ideas for a big play about journalism for the Stage Society, designed to thrill London. Of course I cannot go on at this level or I will be ill. Marguerite is due to return from Paris today and will no doubt make me slow down by deployment of her feminine wiles.

Lovely weather but chilly. Chilblains on hands. Immense pleasure, pretty nearly ecstatic sometimes, in looking at the country, in being in it, particularly by the Seine and in the forest. I said to myself the other morning that the early savage used to prowl about from his cave like that and that I might almost meet one in the forest; whereupon it occurred to me that I was exactly the early savage over again, prowling round his cave, with the same sniffing sensations of instinctive joy in nature. We have lost a great deal in the acquisition of civilisation. Perhaps too much. Of course the life of primitive man was short and beset by hardship and violence, but how much richer it must have been in many respects. Is the worth of a life to be measured by the number of days lived, or by the way one lives today? Very curious this getting down to the bedrock of existence.