Did I think I could have it to-morrow? Did I think I could have it this afternoon? And did I think that possibly, possibly I could get a tassel for it: a big lavender tassel that would hang down all at one side.
Monday, May 29th
I went this afternoon to the Pré Catelan, for the first time in very long. I went in by the gate near the stone column.
There were quite a lot of motors waiting at the gate; it did not look war as it did last year. Last year, in May, the gates were always almost shut, and when people came they had to push through. Last year the little park was very empty. We used to wander as we pleased across the lawns and gather primroses that grew for nobody. But now there were people in the paths; especially Nounou with her broad ribbons and her campstool, and the baby, and Monsieur l'Abbé, playing blind man's buff with the bigger children.
Green lawns, bright as live green fire, the trees all in delicate misty leaf, light greens and dark greens and copper and amber and gold, filmy and drifting, as veils, about the trunks and boughs and branches.
The flower-beds were full of hyacinths and forget-me-nots.
Never, never, surely has spring meant so much as in these two years of war.
All the birds of spring were singing. All of them. The grass of the lawns was full of little starry pink and white daisies.
By the little watercourse there was a bank of blue flowers. They were reflected in the water, very, very blue. I do not know what they were. They were of a much more intense blue than the myosotis. I did not go to see what they were; I thought they might be the blue flowers of happiness, and that it was better I did not go too near.
The hideous, huge restaurant is a hospital. The paths and the road to it, and the lawns and garden beds about it are corded off that people may not go and look. From the distance, you see vague, white shapes of things, and figures all in white, moving about inside the great plateglass windows!