Country Life, Nov. 19, 1904, title detail from the illustrated article on "Clouds" by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

No, I couldn't wait for the leather dressing to arrive, and imagine my joy when I discovered this article on a house about which I have already devoted so much attention and time and more than a few entries. [Here for instance].

As you know, it is the portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Percy Wyndham by George Frederic Watts which hangs in the shadowy background of the more famous portrait by Sargent of her daughters, Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane and Mrs. Tennant, otherwise known as The Wyndham Sisters, painted in 1900 and sold by Dick Wyndham in 1927 through Knoedler to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 The Hall, Clouds, from Country Life (1904)

Caroline Dakers' Clouds, The Biography of a Country House, (Yale University Press, 1993) as I have mentioned before is a perfect book not only about the Wyndhams and their house, but about an era and a way of life, the rise and decline of which is of such great interest to me, for reasons I have tried endlessly to explain to you, but for now let the phrase "history repeats" suffice.

I am also reading David Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, (the 1999 Vintage Press edition with a new Preface), so you can appreciate I've got rise and fall on my mind.

Plus, isn't it fun to find an article on the house written by the man who had an affair with the lady who lived there, the Hon Mrs. Percy Wyndham, and who would go on to have an affair with her daughter Mary, then Lady Elcho, fathering her fifth child (her other lover Arthur Balfour - the prime minister in 1904 -- was rumored to have fathered her sixth).  Of course, no one reading Country Life in 1904 would have known.  No one, that is, who would have admitted to knowing.

I could go on and on, but regretfully I spent the entire morning removing the latest version of Internet Explorer, which in my foolish zeal to be up-to-date I had installed only to discover (for reasons no one seems able to explain) that it obstinately refused to properly display my hard work or interface with my domain site.  Such a nuisance.  I realize it's just a problem with my browser, but that whole chat we had yeterday about the danger of servers capriciously wiping out content?  A tragedy foretold, is what I kept thinking, until I set matters straight, so to speak.

  Corridor, North End, Clouds

By the way, if you look back to my earlier entry on Clouds, you may notice a reference to our young friend Didier.  I couldn't help noticing myself, and the name alone touched a chord, as you might imagine.  I actually had to pause for a moment in the middle of wrapping up this little post to you, on this quiet little Saturday evening here in my little pied a terre at "The Heights" as we amusingly call it -- which is nowhere near being "in the clouds" but close enough.  Yes, pause, as I was saying, to remember the time poor Didier was hanging out the window about to plunge to his death, and that string of unmarked Crown Vics from the D.A.'s office were parked illegally down below, and all I kept thinking was, this is the price you pay for living on a high enough floor for a decent view... 

Oh I admit I really should catch you up on the adventures of Didier, but not just now.  Not when my heart feels (as Nigel Nicholson once said his did, trying in vain to explain how he felt to Vita) -- not when my heart feels like a peche melba.  Perhaps later, my darling.  Later, in the rise and decline of it all.