Thursday, July 8th

MUGGY WEATHER. I feel low in energy, but I had a wonderful time with The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne Monnier last night in bed, fighting the ‘no-see-ums,” tiny biting insects that I thought at first were fleas. Bramble is back on my bed after forty-eight hours away … I did get anxious this time. She went right up to Tamas to be licked when she came back yesterday at breakfast time.

It’s a pity to read Monnier in English. Here is one passage that gave me great pleasure (p. 197):

“Lunch with Colette. How is it that was going to come about? Colette is a woman who has a horror of being disturbed. For my part, I have a horror of disturbing—a Colette above all. I love to give pleasure, but I cannot imagine how one can give pleasure to Colette when one is not a flower or an animal, a taste or a scent, a color or music. Her world comes before the human or after the human: it is the kingdom of the Mother, with its great primal fire and its final fires. One dreams of her presence as turning into a white cat, but it would still be necessary never to die, to be an immortal creature, like an Egyptian god.”

Would Colette herself have assented to that last image? I think not. She would not, I think, have wished to be deprived of death. She wanted to have it all, y compris old age. (Her best work was done when she was crippled by arthritis in her seventies and eighties.) I wish I could discover those last books, Le Fanal Bleu, and the others all over again. I must reread them.

Germaine Lafeuille is coming for lunch … she has never been here and I am very happy to receive her at last. She will feel at home with the furniture from Channing Place—when she was getting her doctorate at Harvard she did some work for my father and often came for Sunday dinner. My father enjoyed her company. He really liked women. Strange to mention this? I believe many men do not.