14 February 1916 – 20 February 1916

We took possession of our country cottage to-day: very charming and overlooking a beautiful Park. Have just discovered the Journal of the De Goncourts and been reading it greedily. Life has really been a commodity. I am boiling over with vitality, chattering amiably to everyone about nothing--argumentative, sanguine, serious, ridiculous. I called old R---- a Rapscallion, a Curmudgeon, and a Scaramouche, and E---- a trull, a drab, a trollop, a callet. "You certainly are a unique husband," said that sweet little lady, and I.... With me, one of the symptoms of delirium is always a melodramatic truculence! I shake my fist in R----'s face and make him explode with laughing.... The sun to-day, and the great, whopping white clouds all bellied out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward. "You must come down for a week end," I said to R---- at lunch. "Come down as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous house--I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and--it's dangerous to lose yourself--makes you late for dinner. When you arrive our gilded janitor will say: 'I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the library.'" "Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose," R---- rejoined. "Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble stair-case--all in barbaric splendour." "Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down," said R----, phlegmatically. And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And I am sure that the match which fired the gun-powder was the discovery of the De Goncourts' Journal! It's extraordinary how I have been going on from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the heart's desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have died unconscious that the De Goncourts had ever lived and written their colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished it--a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die before having ever been in love--to die and never to have been in love! --for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.