BACK TO PARIS AND CELEBRITIES
Cocteau told me that he and Mo'ise were opening
a new night club and cafe in the Rue Boissy d'Anglas,
near the Rond Point. I saw Cocteau quite often
and met Erik Satie with him. Satie was a divine
old gentleman with a most malicious tongue and
diabolic face. We got on very well and I saw him
almost every day at the D6me. He lived at Arcueuil,
not far from Paris. No one had ever been to see him
except, I think, on one occasion, Jean Cocteau. I
liked him very much as he was quite old, and when
I was with him I always felt rather young and
girlish. I was at this time beginning to feel rather
old and wondered if I should not take on an attitude
of middle age. Now and then, when feeling really
depressed about my age, I would remember what
my Catholic convert aunt would say to me, " Those
that the Gods love always die young." She care-
fully explained, I was eighteen at the time, that this
saying did not mean that one died at a youthful age
but that one's spirit remained young when in years
one was old. This I have found out is true as a most
divine lady, Lady H,, died not long ago at the age
of eighty-four, much younger in spirit than many of
the young things of to-day, who, as far as I can see,
have never been young at all. She had a most
wonderful figure, the figure of a girl of twenty.
Her face, it is true, was lined. I never, alas, met
her/but I have seen her dancing until the early
hours of the morning with all the best looking young
men in London* Satie had been a contemporary
of Debussy's and of Alphonse AUais, whose works
nobody in England has, as far as I can make out,
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