s du Louvre trooping into its prison at 7.30
a.m. to spend a happy day of eleven and a half hours in humouring the
whims of the great shopping classes, I was charmed to watch this handsome
and vapid creature idling away whole hours at her window and enjoying the
gaze of persons like myself. She never read. Once when I had a bit of a
discussion with her husband at lunch upon an intellectual matter, she got
up and walked away with an impatient gesture of disdain, as if to say:
"What has all this got to do with Love?" Her husband never read, either.
Their friends did not read, not even newspapers. But another couple had an
infant, aged three, and this infant had a rather fierce grandmother, and
this grandmother read a great deal. She and I alone stood for literature.
She would stay at home with the infant while the intermediate generation
was away larking. She was always reading the same book. It was a thick
book, with a glossy coloured cover displaying some scene in which homicide
and passion were mingled; its price, new, was sixpence halfpenny, and its
title was simply and magnificently, "Borgia!" with a note of exclamation
after it. She confined herself to "Borgia!" She was tireless with
"Borgia!" She went home to Paris reading "Borgia!" It was a shocking
hotel, so different from the literary hotels of Switzerland, Bournemouth,
and Scarborough, where all the guests read Meredith and Walter Pater. I
ought to have been ashamed to be seen in such a place. My only excuse is
that the other two hotels in the remote little village were just as bad,
probably worse.

THE BRITISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS

[Sidenote:_18 Aug. '10_]

A correspondent writes angrily to me because I have not written angrily
about the list of authors recently put forward as Academicians of the
proposed new British Academy of Letters. The fact is that the entire
scheme of the British Academy of Letters had a near shave of escaping my
attention altogether. I only heard of it by accident, being away on a
holiday in a land where they have had enough of academies. But for the
miracle of a newspaper found on a fishing-boat I might not have even known
what on earth my correspondent was raging about. In literary circles such
as mine the new British Academy of Letters has not been extensively
advertised. In the main I agree with my correspondent's criticisms of the
list. But I must say that his ire shows a certain naivete. None but a
young and trustful man c