Enter on the lawn a nurse bearing my dinner-tray. After dinner I retire to bed....
One day, Teixeira added, 17.7.20, I’ll return to those men of the nineties (I will never write a book about them: really I was too much outside them)....
I trust that some Leonard Merricks are on the way: I’m nigh starved for books again. Don’t send me Zola or Balzac in English: I couldn’t stomach the translations. And I expect you’re right about Balzac’s French style. Those giants were awful chaps: Balzac, Rubens, the pylon-designing Baines, brrr!...
On 22.7.20 he writes:
I beseech you, if you haven’t it, buy yourself a copy of The Home Life of Herbert Spencer. By “Two.” It is the book praised by “Rozbury” in his letter to Arrowsmith prefacing The Diary of a Nobody. I bought it and began to shake with laughter at Rosebery’s being such an ass. But, after a few pages, I began to see what he meant; and then, time after time, I nearly rolled off my long-chair with laughing not at Rosebery but with him. I’d lend it you, but it’ll only cost you 3/6; and I want you to have it as a companion volume to The Diary.
However, if you will not buy it, I will lend it to you. You’ve “got” to read it, or I will never write you another letter.
And on 23.7.20:
Some 32 years ago, “Pearl Hobbes” wrote to me that I ought to translate Balzac; and I am sorry it is too late for me to do Goriot. I am rereading it all the same with much enjoyment, though I think that these gala editions should be at least as well translated as my Lutetian set of six Zola novels.
Huxley, in his little autobiography, writes:
“As Rastignac, in the Père Goriot, says to Paris, I said to London: