When at length I settled down in a small hotel in a village on the farther coast of Brittany, I had read nothing but Andreief and criminal processes.  Nobody else in the hotel, save one old lady, read anything but criminal processes.  It is true that it was a sadly vulgar hotel.  My fellow-guests were mainly employees who had escaped for a fortnight from the big Paris shops.  In particular there was a handsome young woman from the fur department of the Grands Magasins du Louvre, who (weather permitting) spent half her morning in a kimono at her bedroom window while her husband (perfumery department) discussed patriotism and feminism in the cafe below.  When I remember the spectacle, which I have often seen, of the staff of the Grands Magasins du Louvre trooping into its prison at 7.30 a.m. to spend a happy day of eleven and a half hours in humouring the whims of the great shopping classes, I was charmed to watch this handsome and vapid creature idling away whole hours at her window and enjoying the gaze of persons like myself.  She never read.  Once when I had a bit of a discussion with her husband at lunch upon an intellectual matter, she got up and walked away with an impatient gesture of disdain, as if to say:  “What has all this got to do with Love?” Her husband never read, either.  Their friends did not read, not even newspapers.  But another couple had an infant, aged three, and this infant had a rather fierce grandmother, and this grandmother read a great deal.  She and I alone stood for literature.  She would stay at home with the infant while the intermediate generation was away larking.  She was always reading the same book.  It was a thick book, with a glossy coloured cover displaying some scene in which homicide and passion were mingled; its price, new, was sixpence halfpenny, and its title was simply and magnificently, “Borgia!” with a note of exclamation after it.  She confined herself to “Borgia!” She was tireless with “Borgia!” She went home to Paris reading “Borgia!” It was a shocking hotel, so different from the literary hotels of Switzerland, Bournemouth, and Scarborough, where all the guests read Meredith and Walter Pater.  I ought to have been ashamed to be seen in such a place.  My only excuse is that the other two hotels in the remote little village were just as bad, probably worse.

THE BRITISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS

[Sidenote:_18 Aug. ’10_]

A correspondent writes angrily to me because I have not written angrily about the list of authors recently put forward as Academicians of the proposed new British Academy of Letters.  The fact is that the entire scheme of the British Academy of Letters had a near shave of escaping my attention altogether.  I only heard of it by accident, being away on a holiday in a land where they have had enough of academies.  But for the miracle of a newspaper found on a fishing-boat I might not have even known what on earth my correspondent