Friday Calm: Reading

Reading on the bank of a slow river . . .  what greater calm can there be?

On a spring day such as this, I’m remembering as if I’d eaten it myself the simple Parisian omelette which struck me with such force in Henry James’s wistful The Ambassadors when I read it many springs ago, wistful too, and has stayed with me all these years (feeding some kind of aesthetic hunger).

It was on this pleasant basis of costly disorder, consequently, that they eventually seated themselves, on either side of a small table, at a window adjusted to the busy quay and the shining barge-burdened Seine; where, for an hour, in the matter of letting himself go, of diving deep, Strether was to feel he had touched bottom. He was to feel many things on this occasion, and one of the first of them was that he had travelled far since that evening in London, before the theatre, when his dinner with Maria Gostrey, between the pink-shaded candles, had struck him as requiring so many explanations.

. . .

He, for the hour, saw reasons enough in the mere way the bright clean ordered water-side life came in at the open window?— the mere way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her grey eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his face and their human questions.

image:  Theodore Robinson, La Roche Guyon, Brooklyn Museum