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Vita Sackville-West
Published by Good Press, 2021
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This meant that, standing in the last doorway, one could see right down the vista of rooms; that is to say, down the rooms represented by the twenty windows on the side street, until the flat turned the corner and took on a new lease of life represented by the twenty windows on the boulevard.
It was an impressive vista. Parquet floors, ivory woodwork, tarnished gilding—it seemed they must be reflected in a halfway mirror, so endlessly did they continue. I was irreverent, of course. Whenever I thought great-grandmother safe in her bedroom, I used to slide along the parquet, or, more irreverent still, get her wheeled chair out of the dining room and trundle myself down the vista. I shiver now to think of the bruised paint and dented ormolu that must have marked my progress—for, unlike great-grandmother’s stately advance in the wheeled chair, my one idea was to go as fast as I could. But what did I know then of the privilege that was mine in being admitted to that beautiful house? Small and clean, with painfully frizzed hair, I would stand by, very bored, while visitors marvelled at the furniture under the direction of great-grandmother’s stick. Louis Quatorze, Louis Quinze, Louis Seize, Directoire, Empire—all these were names, half meaningless, which I absorbed till they became as familiar as bread, milk, water, butter. Empire came last on the list; for the life of the house seemed to have stopped there. As the door of the antechamber closed behind you, the gulf of a century opened, and you stood on the further side.
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