314
PART/SAN REVJEW
lunching alone at the Restaurant Voltaire, where I was lunching with
Peter Quennell who was over from London for a few days. I asked him
if he would like to meet Andre Gide, he said of course he would. So I
went over and asked Gide if I might introduce an English poet to him,
the difficult Gide returned,
"Mademoiselle, qu'est ce que je peux lui dire,
je nai rien
a
lui dire."
Undaunted, I brought Peter up to him. Of course
they got on perfectly, I left them alone to talk. I can see the two faces
now, Peter's ethereal profile, and Gide's .like a studious monk.
•
There is always a certain difficulty in dealing with French intel·
lectuals, and it is above all the difficulty of lack of familiararity-they
lack social ease. With the exception of a few Americanised or Anglicised
French intellectuals (and there was a certain vogue for imitating Ameri·
can manners and loose clothes among the very young), one always comes
up against the
permettez Madame,
and the continual Mademoiselleing,
which makes one feel as if one were at a permanent bureaucratic bureau
or a genteel tea shop. Underneath the French writer there is always the
bourgeois in a suit that is a size too small and the inevitable leather case
under his arm. It is practically impossible for a French writer casually
to ask you back to his apartment for a drink; he will ask you to meet him
in a Cafe, or he will say, "I shall be at home on Monday week." You
arrive, and are offered some bad Port in tiny liqueur glasses, with the
alternative of some sweet syrup, usually Mirabelle. This is so, because,
in
a sense, the French still live in the shadow of the eighteenth century, they
still sit in small hard chairs, and do not feel completely at home outside
the family. Whereas the English intellectual feels at home anywhere
~d
everywhere except in the family circle, where he is bored stiff, and always
slightly embarrassed. He has little or no manners, and little respect for
anyone. The French boy has more facts crammed into him at the age of
twelve, than the English boy knows at the age of eighteen, the result being
that the French intellectual is completely cynical and worn out by the
time he reaches maturity, and the English equivalent is beginning to grow
up and start educating himself when well over thirty, and possesses a
kind of eternal youth.
•
I often saw Paul Valery, who on first sight looked so unlike a poet
but rather like a neat little Joctor about to visit a rich patient. Only later
did one realize that the expression on his face was unlike anything one
had seen before. Jacques Emile Blanche has caught it exactly in his por·
trait of Valery-his eyes and his slightly open mouth have a look of
death about them, as if he had already passed by death and retained some·
thing.
"L'Univers n'est qu'un defaut dans la purete du non-etre"-his
poetry has this marble quality, this taste of eternity; and Valery's mind
had this same quality of clarity and silence, even when he was talking
in
his quick staccato voice, which had a sharp unpleasant sound. I see him
now, surrounded by smart women begging him to dine or come to their
jours,
looking in his note book and saying (which was quite true ) , "I am
