Mme de Noailles is at the hotel (Princess Hotel) on the rue de Presbourg; the windows of her room look out on the Arc de Triomphe. She was expecting us, and this is rather apparent: she is lying on a chaise-longue made up of two armchairs and a stool that all go together, sinuously draped in a sort of Rumanian or Greek robe of black Tussore silk with a broad band of whitish grey, of that soft white one finds in China paper and certain Japanese felts; he chemise floats amply around her bare arms loaded with Venetian bracelets. A scarf wanders around her, the color of the yolk of a hard-boiled, or rather, a soft-boiled, egg; the colour of dried apricots. Siren, her feet disappear mysteriously under a Tunisian cloth. Her hair is undone, abandoned, and jet-black; cut in bangs on her forehead, but falling as if wet on to her shoulders. 

Impossible to set down anything from the conversation. Mme de Noailles talks with an amazing volubility; the sentences rush to her lips, crush themselves, and become confused in their haste; she says three or four at a time. This makes a very tasty compote of ideas, sensations, images, a tutti-frutti accompanied by gestures of the hands and arms, of the eyes especially, which she turns skyward in a swoon that is not too artificial but rather too encouraged.

I read in a letter from my mother to my father: ‘André would be very nice if he didn’t have a mania for standing a long time absolutely still at the foot of a tree watching snails.’

The letter must date from ’73 (the year of Isabelle Widmer’s marriage, which it mentions earlier). I was therefore four years old.

One of the great rules of art: do not linger.