26 March 1922

Victoria Palace Hotel, Paris

   No - no - hara-kiri is wrong. Why not be a moralist then? But is it to be a moralist - simply to tell someone who does not know what must be done? To share one's discoveries? Even if they don't agree it seems to me you are bound to tell them what you have found best to do. But I know there is an objection to this, and I have been called an ‘interfering schoolmistress' for it. I dont care; I shall go on being one. Of course there must be no violence and no tub-thumping. The other person must think they are having tea with jam. It is however, all rather difficult.
   Manoukhin says that after this week I shall begin to get better. You know there is a grosse reaction after the 5th seance which lasts for about 3 weeks when one is worse in every way. I am at the end of the 2nd week. I long to be better. 8 weeks in a hotel bedroom, never going out once except to the clinic is very deadly. He won't even let me go for a little drive yet. But its not long now.
   Yes I knew M. & H. [Merezhkovsky and Hippius] were liars about Gorki. There was a black stain of malice on every page that had his name. Hippius, too, for a woman of imagination, told awful bangers about her ‘cahiers'. She only had the one, you remember, and after it was filled she wrote on the cover and the lining and under the lining and so on. But no cahier on earth could have been big enough for all she wrote. She would say "I have just found a place for a few lines more" and then followed pages and pages with even quotations, of poetry! This is very inartistic.
 [To S. S. Koteliansky, 25 March 1922.]