Elizabeth Hardwick
MEMOIRS , CONVERSATIONS
AND DIARIES
Alain, the philosopher and writer, arrives first, Valery two
or three minutes later. "Les deux illustres," meeting for the first time,
introduced by Henri Mondor, seat themselves and begin to order
luncheon. Valery, refusing the duck in favor of the meat, remarks,
"Without meat, you would have with you only
M. Neant."
Alain
professes himself able to eat anything, adds that because of his teach–
ing at the Normale he drinks very little, except sometimes milk.
Valery also likes milk, he explains, but goes to excess only with
coffee. And then Alain, unable to restrain himself another moment:
"Avez-vous travailte, ce matin, Orphie?"
(Italics mine.) Yes, Valery
works in the morning and at eleven o'clock his work for the day is
finished.
A note by Clive Bell in the
Symposium
collected in honor of
T.
S. Eliot's sixtieth birthday: "Between Virginia [Woolf] and myself
somehow the poet became a sort of 'family joke': it is not easy to
say why." In the same collection, an essay by Desmond Hawkins: "I
recall an afternoon tea in the early. 1930's. I am the only guest and
my host is a 'distinguished literary figure.' ... I affect to despise the
great man,
of course .
..."
(Italics mine.)
The night boat from Calais chugs along confidently, taking us,
in the
hommage
as in the cuisine, from the French souffle to the
English cold veal.
We hardly know how to approach these "minutes" of the
luncheons between literary men in France, those "Mardis" of
~fal
larmes, those evenings at Magny's restaurant in the Goncourt
Journals
where Saint-Beuve and Gautier with a mysterious and al–
most painful genius still
exist
on the page, neither life exactly nor
