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Paris: 31 rue de Tournon

February 1914

To J. M. Murry

LESLEY writes me, the weather is beastly—and here it is so warm and sunny that I have sat with my window open yesterday and to-day. (Yes, dear, mentioned ‘with intent.’) I wish you would buy a pair of shoes as well as the pepper and salt trousers. Try to. You want them so badly and I've no faith in those cheap Boulevard beauties.

Everything, here, too ‘is just the same.’ The femme de ménage is singing in the kitchen—a most improbable song. It runs along, very blithe and nice—for about five notes and then it drops—any distance you like, but a little deeper each time. If the ‘aspects’ were not good that song would frighten me no end … pro-vi-ded that I was in a little house on the edge of the steppes with a mushroom shaped cloud over it and no smoke coming out of the chimney, etc., etc. But things being what they are, my romantic mind imagines it a kind of fifteenth century French Provincial Ride-a-Cock-Horse—you know the business … dashing off on someone's knee to get a pound of butter and being suddenly “tumbled into the gutter.” Which, after all, is a very pleasant place to fall. I wonder if Queens played this Disturbing Game with their youngest pages.

My door has been mended. I am told that a workman came at nine, wrenched out the remains of the old panel, tapped the wood with an iron hammer, clapped in a new panel, clattered over the hall—but I did not hear a sound. I slept until a quarter to ten.