To Vita Sackville-West

Concentrate your mind upon this, and give me your answer. Suppose we start (you and I and Potto) on Saturday 22nd. Sleep in Paris. Get to SAULIEU on Monday … Do you want to go 2nd or 1st (I insist on 1st on the boat) If first is much more comfortable, first is advisable. Not otherwise; because first class travellers are always old fat testy and smell of eau de cologne, which makes me sick. (Woolf 1975–80, vol. 3: 528)

To Virginia Woolf

Your letter has caught me, as we leave early tomorrow morning. I am absolutely overjoyed to think that our France may really materialise, and I beg you to get the tickets before you have time to change your mind. (Sackville-West 1985: 298)

To Vita Sackville-West

Oh there's a lot to talk to you about: Orlando: Radclyffe Hall: etc.

I am getting a fish basket for Potto.

Shall you be bored with me?

To Virginia Woolf

I write in a hurry because I am just starting for Eton with Ben.

Monday, – yes. Could you send a postcard to say

• 1) what time the boat starts,

• 2) how much I owe you for the tickets

• 3) the name of the hotel in Saulieu (Sackville-West 1985: 300)

To Virginia Woolf

It was queer, reading some of your letters, in the light of having been with you so much lately. A fitful illumination played over them, – a sort of cross-light, – (do you realise that at Auppegard one is always in a cross-light? a symbolic fact which would, I feel, have had more influence on you or me, had either of us chanced to live there, than it has had on the relatively unimaginative natures of Ethel and Nan.) Well, a sort of cross-light, as I say, played across them, projected half from the rather tentative illumination of the past and half from the fuller illumination of the present….