To Edmund Gosse.
The seductive "Queen of the Golconda," and of the Boulevard St. Michel, appears in Mr. Gosse's anecdote of Paul Verlaine (French Profiles.) The passage of Loti's Matelot, to which H. J. refers, is the following: "Donc, ils en venaient à s'aimer d'une également pure tendresse, tous les deux. Elle, ignorante des choses d'amour et lisant chaque soir sa bible; elle, destinée à rester inutilement fraîche et jeune encore pendant quelques printemps pâles comme celui-ci, puis à vieillir et se faner dans l'enserrement monotone de ces mêmes rues et de ces mêmes murs. Lui, gâté déjà par les baisers et les étreintes, ayant le monde pour habitation changeante, appelé à partir, peut-être demain, pour ne revenir jamais et laisser son corps aux mers lointaines."
Hôtel Westminster, Paris.
Monday [May 1st, 1893].
My dear Gosse,
I have delayed too long to thank you for your genial last: which please attribute to the misery of my Boulevard-baffled aspirations. Paris n'est plus possible—from any point of view—and I leave it tomorrow or next day, when my address will become: Hotel National, Lucerne. I join my brother there for a short time. This place continues to rengorger with sunshine and sauces, not to mention other appeals to the senses and pitfalls to the pocket. I am not alluding in particular to the Queen of Golconda! I have read Matelot more or less over again; for the extreme penury of the idea in Loti, and the almost puerile thinness of this particular donnée, wean me not a jot from the irresistible charm the rascal's very limitations have for me. I drink him down as he is—like a philtre or a baiser, and the coloration of his moindre mots has a peculiar magic for me. Read aloud to yourself the passage ending section XXXV—the upper part of page 165, and perhaps you will find in it something of the same strange eloquence of suggestion and rhythm as I do: which is what literature gives when it is most exquisite and which constitutes its sovereign value and its resistance to devouring time. And yet what niaiseries! Paris continues gorgeous and rainless, but less torrid. I have become inured to fear as careless of penalties. There are no new books but old papiers de famille et d'arrière-boutique dished up. Poor Harland came and spent 2 or 3 hours with me the other afternoon—at a café-front and on chairs in the Champs-Elysées. He looked better than the time previous, but not well; and I am afraid things are not too well with him. One would like to help him—and I try to—in talk; but he is not too helpable, for there is a chasm too deep to bridge, I fear, in the pitfall of his literary longings unaccompanied by the faculty. Apropos of such things I am very glad to see your faculty is reflowering. I shall return to England for the volume. Are you writing about Symonds? Vale—especially in the manual part. And valeat your dame compagne.
Yours, my dear Gosse, always,
HENRY JAMES.
To Robert Louis Stevenson.
Stevenson, writing to H. J. from Vailima, June 17, 1893, announced that he was sending a photograph of his wife. "It reminds me of a friend of my grandmother's who used to say when talking to younger women, 'Aweel, when I was young, I wasnae just exactly what ye wad call bonny, but I was pale, penetratin', and interestin'.'" (Letters to his Family and Friends.)
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
August 5th, 1893.