14 September
14 September
14 September 1920
Travelling to Menton, France
The heat is almost as great as when we arrived last year. One can wear nothing but a wisp of silk, two bows of pink ribbon & a robe de mousseline. Moustiques and moucherons are in full blast; we are both bitten to death already. They are frightful. But so far I can accept them without a reproach. The compensations are so great.
I must tell you a very big date palm grows outside my bedroom bal¬cony window. At the end of the garden wall (a yellow crumbling wall) there is a vast magnolia full of rich buds. There is a tap in the garden. In the vegetable garden the french artichokes are ready to eat and minute yellow and green marrows. A tangerine tree is covered in green balls.
I hope all this description doesn't bore you darling. But I content myself with thinking you are going to see it yourself one day & so my description is only "in advance".
The view is surpassingly beautiful. Late last night on the balcony I stood listening to the tiny cicadas & to the frogs and to someone playing a lit-tle chain of notes on a flute.
I do not know what it is about this place. But it is enough just to be here for everything to change. I think already of the poetry you would write if you lived such a life. I wish you were not tied. I have always at the bottom of my deep cup of happiness that dark spot which is that you arc not living as you would wish to live . . .
Here is Annette with a big dish of fresh lemons - broken off with the leaves remaining. And its lunch time. The heat! [Letter to J. M. Murry in Collected Letters]