Diary of Madame Egout Pour Sweet

Then there is Diary of Madame Egout Pour Sweet by Rina Hands which was published by Two Rivers Press in 1991. (Two Rivers Press is part of the Two Rivers Farm Gurdjieff group in Oregon, US, and should not be confused with a small literary UK publisher of the same name.) Hands was a pupil of J G Bennett, also ex British army but subsequently an intelligence officer as well, who studied under Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and became a spiritual guide in his own right (see the Bennett website). She was given the honorary title of ‘égout’ (French for ‘sewer’ or ‘drain’) by Gurdjieff during evening meals with him in Paris, during the last few months of his life in 1948-1949. Rina wrote this diary primarily for herself, the publisher says, ‘for she was certain even then of the importance of those days’.