Spring was laving the city in warmth and pale gold.
‘I have sad news for you two gentlemen,’ said the proprietor of the Hôtel Jules-César. ‘I must raise the price of your room. This cuts me to the heart, for I understand you are men of letters and I am a great admirer of literature in any language. From now on your room will cost you an extra ten francs a day—to cover my increased expenses.’
‘But surely,’ said Graeme, ‘your expenses will not be so high now, with no heating?’
‘Put it in a new way, then. We are all caught up in the inexorable law of supply and demand. It is the month of May, you see, and the Americans are coming.’
Making a survey of hotel prices in the neighbourhood, we found they had all been raised for the same reason. This was discouraging. We saw ourselves forced to spend much less on food or drink, and perhaps on both. That evening we met Daphne Berners at the Dôme. She was looking as handsome as ever in the tailored suit and fedora hat.
‘Angela and I are going tomorrow to live with an old hake in Marly,’ she said. ‘She wants me to paint her portrait—in renaissance costume. I can stretch the job out for two or three months because we both love the green grass and the birds, not to mention all the good country food and the nice fresh milk and cheese. Do you want to sublet our studio?’
We agreed immediately and moved our trunks there the next day.
The place looked even better by daylight. The little strip of garden facing the row of studios now turned out to be filled with friezes and sculptures discarded by former tenants who had either left them in payment of rent or found them too heavy to move. They were of many styles and periods. There was a portrait-bust of a man in a frock-coat with his palm supporting his chin in a fine, melting, bourgeois-romantic attitude; a bas-relief of the Three Graces in which, contrary to custom, they were all seen from behind; and an astonishing sculpture representing a pair of standing Eskimos locked in the act of coitus, like a double peanut, and giving a powerful impression of unity. Opposite the studio was a ramshackle booth housing three stand-up toilets.
The studio itself combined beauty and inconvenience. There was no electricity, only a cold-water wash-basin, and the roof leaked badly though fortunately not on the beds. But it was about 40 feet by 60, 20 feet high at least, with a full skylight and a whole north wall made up of waist-high windows. To us, who had been cooped up in the windowless little room in the Jules-César all winter, it brought a message of physical freedom. For furniture there was a big battered desk with a leather top, a round table to eat at, four comfortable swaybacked chairs, some tattered tapestry curtains flanking the alcove, and two double beds stuffed with straw. There were a few unfinished portraits still in canvas stretchers on the roughly plastered walls—all of them, Daphne told us, by Lady Duff Twysden, who later figured as the insufferable heroine of The Sun Also Rises. The only complication, it turned out when we signed the inventory, was that everything in the studio belonged to different people—most of the furniture to Janet Flanner, the hangings to Dr Maloney, and the beds to a man called Boomhower, whom we never met; the only things Daphne owned were the collection of half-broken dishes, the pots and pans, the gramophone, and a great adjustable cheval-glass. We never knew who owned the lease, and merely paid the rent to the concierge, an old woman called Madame Hernie who lived across the street and spent all her time illuminating the entries in a folio-sized album devoted to the records of her family funerals.
This place was to be our home on and off for the next year and a half. It was here that I tried seriously to write for the first time, here I brought my two or three girls, and here I met the woman with whom I at last fell in love and whom, however miserable the outcome of that love, I shall always remember in this setting as she undressed one night in a luminous haze of gaslight and moonbeams before we threw ourselves in ecstasy on one of Mr Boomhower’s straw-stuffed beds. It was the theatre of my youth.
The rue Broca was a good deal farther from Montparnasse than the Jules-César, but the studio was cheaper and more comfortable than the hotel-room, and the exercise of walking a mile to the quarter every evening did us both good. We had already had quite enough of the Right Bank and had long since given up the luxury of taxis. We now explored the working quarter to the east, the network of streets running off in all directions from the rue de la Glaciére, the home of unusual occupations and trades: of the producers of catskin waistcoats, fake antiques, glass eyes, woodworking machinery, and martinets for punishing children. We learned the elements of cookery, bought a shopping-basket, and came home weighed down with wine and cheese. Waking at eleven o’clock we had a view of sunstruck steeples, chimney-pots, and the greenery of the neighbouring Ursuline Convent, and every day on our way to Montparnasse we passed the handsome medieval walls of the city madhouse and the Santé prison. Graeme had resumed planning The Flying Carpet and I was writing the third chapter of this book when I received another letter from my father.
‘You have now been almost two months in Paris,’ he wrote, ‘and after further consideration of your project of a literary career I must once more express my disapproval. As you well know, I altogether disapprove of literature as a futile and unmanly pursuit and one that cannot but lead to poverty and unhappiness. I accordingly advise you that your allowance from now on will be halved.’
This was a blow. However, fifty dollars a month was enough for us to get along on for a while, and the rent was paid for three months.
‘Perhaps,’ said Graeme, ‘one of us should get some kind of work. I’ll go to the Chicago Tribune and see if they need a proofreader.’
But they did not. In the evening we decided to go to the counter of the Dôme and drink until things looked rosier.
Diana Tree was there. She had by now severed her connection with her surrealist lover and was living alone. She was talking of Raymond Duncan, a walking absurdity who dressed in an ancient handwoven Greek costume and wore his hair in long braids reaching to his waist, adding, on ceremonial occasions, a fillet of bay-leaves.
‘He’s really not a bad kind of person,’ she said. ‘He has a heart of gold and some of his designs for weaving are very chaste. Damn it all, he is sincere.’
‘Rats,’ said a small, handsome, carelessly dressed man standing beside her. ‘He’s an exhibitionist with nothing to show. He’s trying to prove he’s something besides being Isadora’s brother, and he’s not. His milieu is the bourgeoisie. Yah!’
‘Have you met Robert McAlmon?’ said Diana. ‘Bob, these are the boys from Montreal.’
He looked at us with humorous contempt. ‘Have a drink,’ he said. ‘Di has been telling me about you. You’re Canadians. I was in the Canadian army for a while during the war but I deserted.’
I had heard of him only as a minor legend, as a man saddled with the nickname of ‘Robber McAlimony’, which he had gained by marrying a wealthy woman and then living alone and magnificently on an allowance from her multimillionaire father. I was at once impressed by his charm, loneliness and bitterness, touched by his vanity and refreshed by his rudeness; even at this first meeting he was impressive through a total absence of attitude or artifice. I had not yet read anything he had written.
After a few more drinks he proposed going to the bar of the Coupole. ‘I’ve a charge account there,’ he said. ‘Paying for drinks is depressing. Come on, kids!’
At the Coupole we switched from vermouth to brandy. McAlmon’s own capacity for alcohol was astounding: within the next half-hour he drank half a dozen double whiskies with no apparent effect. His conversation, consisting of disjointed expletives and explosions of scorn, was fascinating in its anarchy. He admired no writing of any kind, either ancient or modern; all government was a farce; all people were fools or snobs. He spoke of his friends with utter contempt, insulted Diana and laughed at Graeme and me—but all with such an absence of conviction that one could not take him seriously. He was obviously enjoying himself. I soon became hungry—for Graeme and I, following our new plan of saving money, had gone without lunch.
‘We’ll have dinner here,’ Bob said, and at once ordered a canard pressé and two bottles of Moselle.
The duck arrived half an hour later and there was barely enough for three. Diana, however, had made a point of ordering three double ice-cream sodas from the American soda-fountain to finish off with. ‘The boys,’ she said, ‘have good appetites. That duck, McAlmon, is just a snob dish. You always order it. Will you tell me for God’s sake why?’
He threw back his head. ‘It makes no demands on me. It has an elegant quality and I can face eating it and seeing other people eating it. Now let’s all have another drink.’
‘Not for me,’ she said. ‘I have to get back to my love-child in St Cloud, bless his black little heart.’ She turned to me as she went out: ‘Good night, don’t drink too much, and watch out for the Great White Father.’
McAlmon now turned his wit against Graeme and me. I had already noticed his small thin mouth and piercing stare, but it was clear he was far from being the kind of invert whose predilection shapes his whole personality.
‘What did Diana say to you?’ he said, drawing his chair up.
‘Not to drink too much.’
‘Rats, what you two need is a good drunk.’ He pushed between us, putting his arms around our shoulders. ‘Come out of yourselves. Be extrovert. You especially,’ he pinched my ear. ‘Forget all this turd about the literary life for a while. It doesn’t suit you at all.’
I nodded. He was rich, famous and extremely amusing, and moreover I liked him enormously.
It soon appeared that his chosen role was to be the fatherly or avuncular, and I began to hope he was more vain of being seen with young men than actually covetous of their favours. This hope was dispelled by a burly, moonfaced man, dressed in baggy tweeds and with his necktie clewed by a gold pin, who came noisily into the bar and greeted our table with a loud, ‘Well, Bob, up to your old tricks again?’
McAlmon’s sallow face turned pink. ‘If it isn’t Ernest, the fabulous phony! How are the bulls?’
‘And how is North America McAlmon, the unfinished Poem?’ He leaned over and pummelled McAlmon in the ribs, grinning and blowing beery breath over the table. ‘Room for me here, boys?’
‘It’s only Hemingway,’ said Bob loudly to both of us. ‘Pay no attention and he may go away.’
Hemingway gave a lopsided grin and moved into a seat at the next table. He was better looking than his pictures, but his eyes were curiously small, shrewd and reticent, like a politician’s, and he had a moustache that was plainly designed to counteract the fleshy roundness of his jowls, though it did not. I found him almost as unattractive as his short stories—those studies in tight-lipped emotionalism and volcanic sentimentality that, with their absurd plots and dialogue, give me the effect of a gutless Prometheus who has tied himself up with string.
‘See anything of Sylvia these days?’ he asked diffidently.
‘The Beach? Rats, no! We had a row last year. I don’t like old women anyway.’
‘No one could accuse you of that, Bob.’
‘Leave my friends out of this.’
‘Me? You brought them in. Anyway, go to hell.’ Hemingway got up and moved heavily to the bar.
‘Watch,’ said Bob. ‘Pretty soon he’ll be twisting wrists with some guy at the bar. Trying to establish contact. Ah ha ha ha! and he never will. Just a poor bugger from the sticks. But believe me, he’s going places, he’s got a natural talent for the public eye, has that boy. He’s the original Limelight Kid, just you watch him for a few months. Wherever the limelight is, you’ll find Ernest with his big lovable boyish grin, making hay. Balls. We’d better go to the rue de Lappe. I crave genuine depravity.’
He herded us outside and into an open taxi. The night was like velvet, the spring sky full of stars, the air soft and humid and full of the exciting smell of city dust laid by sprinklers. My stomach, at last assimilating the mixture of vermouth, brandy, duck, wine and ice-cream soda, was soon settled by the motion of the wheels. We went down the boulevard Raspail, along St Germain, crossed the Pont Sully to reach the Bastille, and then slid into a mysterious, sinister street lit here and there by the lights of little dancings. We stopped outside the Bal des Chiffoniers.
“Now watch out, boys,’ said Bob in a conspiratorial tone. ‘Don’t get high-hat with anyone. If they want to dance with you, go ahead. But don’t let them steer you into the can or you’ll get raped.’
I liked the Bal des Chiffoniers. Unlike the Petite Chaumiére it was brilliantly lit and the atmosphere was genuine. These pale weedy youths in shabby tight-fitting suits, sporting so many rings and bracelets, these heavy men with the muscles of coal-heavers, rouged, powdered and lip-sticked, these quiet white-haired elders with quivering hands and heads and the unwinking stare of the obsessed—all conveyed the message of an indomitable vitality, a quenchless psychic urge. Never had I felt the force of human desire projected with such vigour as by these single-minded devotees of the male; and I felt at the same time that this very desire, barely tolerated and so often persecuted by society, had already made its tragic marriage of convenience with the forces of a stupid criminality simply because both were equally proscribed and hunted down. These profound thoughts were interrupted by Bob calling for champagne.
Even before it arrived Graeme had been seized upon as dance partner by an odd creature in a silver-laced black velvet doublet and shoulder-length ringlets, who spoke in a strange archaic French because, as he said, he was reproducing the graces, at once virile and baroque, of the age of Louis XIII. For my own part I was soon being waltzed around the floor by a coal-black Negro of ferocious appearance who never uttered a word but danced so well that I even began to enjoy myself. The vertigo of the French waltz, whoever one’s partner, is always superior to that induced by alcohol.
When the band stopped the Negro led me back silently to our table, where Bob was sitting and drinking a magnum of mousseux. He was about to leave when Bob told him to sit down.
‘I’ll bet you’re an American,’ he said in English. ‘Come on. Aren’t you?’
The Negro grinned shyly. ‘Sure I am, you guessed it. Name of Jack Relief, but trying to pass for a foreigner. I thank you kindly and I will join you for a few minutes, being solitary here. My, but don’t your friend here dance good! A petal, a feather, a regular pussycat on his footsies. Can I offer you all a genuine Cuban cigarillo?’ He presented a silver case. Bob did not smoke, but Graeme and I took the thin brown cigarettes and lit them. The aroma was delicious but the smoke was curiously perfumed.
‘This is a nice place,’ I said. ‘Do you come here often?’
‘Sure, I admire the atmosphere. It has colour. I’m a great lover of colour in any form. The colour of this place is, to speak right out of my imagination, a kind of yellow-green.’
‘No,’ said Bob. ‘It’s mauve, a turd-brown mauve.’
‘Perhaps you are speaking, sir, in a popular or accepted way of verbiage. When I identified it as yellow-green I was employing the subjective spectrum of Mallarmé or possibly Rimbaud. In that acception, I would beg to differ, though such impressions are always differential and a matter of dispute.’
‘I see you’re literary,’ said Bob. ‘Who is your favourite author?’
‘Shakespeare,’ said Jack Relief without hesitation. ‘And after him Thomas Hardy.’
‘Hardy? No, no. Too grim, too rustic. He goes around blowing out the candles of the human spirit.’
‘Perhaps he is too Protestant, a Jansenist,’ said Relief. ‘But what breezes blow through his books! Reading Hardy, I feel the wind of Egdon Heath blowing against my poor cheeks. It is the breath of fate, which is also the breath of freedom. We are all involved in that wind.’
I suddenly realized I was nauseated. The room seemed to be whirling and dipping in its blaze of lights. The Negro’s cigarette must have been fortified. I managed to get to the door. Graeme followed me, wearing a worried look. I was aware of Bob paying for the mousseux and hurrying out to join us.
‘He should have some coffee,’ he said, pushing me out of the Bal des Chiffoniers and leading the way to a corner café. We stood at the zinc counter and drank boiling coffee laced with chicory. I began to feel better at once.
‘You made a hit with the dinge,’ Bob was saying.
‘I’m sorry I broke the party up. You never managed to dance. And we didn’t even finish the champagne.’
‘Don’t let that worry you. Come on, Graeme. A whisky, you and me. I’ll bet we’re both Presbyterians. My old man was a minister.’
‘So is mine,’ said Graeme. ‘He never had a church though, he went out on horseback converting the Indians in the Yukon.’
‘Rats! They were all converted long ago.’
‘No, not from paganism. He was converting them from Catholicism.’
‘How did he make out?’
‘I think he re-baptized about a hundred. But of course they all went back to Rome eventually.’
‘You should tell Ernest about that, Graeme. He’s a Catholic and an Indian lover. Christ, I bet he’d make a story out of it. Another of his constipated stories. To hell with literature. Let’s go to Bricktop’s. How about you, sweetie-pie?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Let’s go to Bricktop’s. Where is it?’
‘It’s a long, long way, but the night is young.’ Holding on to the bar with both hands, he began to dance his feet. ‘A long, long way to the Place Pigalle, where the pimps are playing, the whores are swaying, the fairies saying, “Won’t you dance with me, prance with me, be my pal on the Place Pigalle?”’ He kicked his legs in a wild splay-footed shuffle. ‘Come on, where’s a cab?’
We found another open taxi at the Bastille and drove along the wide bright boulevards—Beaumarchais, Magenta and Rochechouart—until we arrived in the blaze of lights of the spider-web of tourist traps, clip-joints and dives around the Place Pigalle. I had never been here before, and though the way the lights staggered up and down the steep hill was attractive I found the atmosphere of the whole district depressing, with the pimps slouching at every corner, the touts outside the boôtes yelling at the passing groups of soldiers and tourists, and every now and then a passing busload of middle-aged American women peeping out from the sectioned windows. We stood at the counter of the Café Pigalle and had some brandy while Bob snuffed the air like a hound.
‘God, what a wonderful smell this quarter has!’ he said. ‘Just like a county fair back home. It’s got a special quality too, so phony you can hardly believe it. The triumph of the fake, the old come-on, the swindle—it’s marvellous, it’s just like life.’
After being skilfully short-changed for our drinks we went down the hill, fighting off the whores who came flapping out of the darkness at us like birds, until we reached a leather-covered door studded with brass nails and with a small round vasistdas at eye-level.
‘Why, Mistah Bob!’ cried a big Negro in a scarlet-and-gold uniform who threw open the door at once. ‘Come in, Mistah Bob! And how you feelin’? Bricktop baby! Come! Here’s the big spendin’ man himself.’
A small, plump, glowing Negress with a bush of dyed red hair ran up and embraced Bob, twittering, ‘Bob honey, so good to see you! Just so good. You and you young friends want to sit at the bar, huh? Hey you, Houston, get off that stool and give some room to the clients, you hear me? Get behind that bar where you belong!’
A small grinning black man in a white jacket slipped under the bar and came up on the other side.
‘First round is on the house, Houston,’ said Bricktop. ‘Anything the boys desire, except the champagne.’
We had three of Houston’s specials. This was a long drink of such potency that the first sip seemed to blow the top of my head off.
Bob, already restive in familiar surroundings, began eyeing the people at the tables with his usual air of challenge and hostility. Bricktop slid up beside Graeme and whispered to him, ‘You make Bob behave till I’m done singing, eh baby? I can tell he primed for mischief. I got some very prominent people here tonight, real big folks from show business, and I don’t want Bob to insult them right off.’
‘Right,’ said Graeme. He was always impressive in any situation calling for firmness and quick thinking, and I admired his way of distracting Bob, who already seemed prepared to launch from his stool and accost a party in ball-gowns and tail-coats, among whom I recognized Beatrice Lillie.
‘Listen, McAlmon,’ he said, ‘just why do you run down every book written in the last thirty years? I agree with you about Hemingway, he’s not even a serious writer, but what about Fitzgerald? Now isn’t Gatsby a good book, perhaps a great book?’
‘Great? Great? Jesus, what is all that snob-crap compared to War and Peace?’
‘War and Peace? A movie by De Mille. A blown-up mural full of characters from a comic strip. An epic for morons.’
Bob gave his lipless smile. ‘You know, Graeme, you’re right eloquent. You may even have something there. I thought you were just another Presbyterian from the sticks, but I’m changing my mind as of now. Anyway, the only people I don’t like are bankers. Are you with me there, Graeme?’
‘All the way. My brother’s a banker. Ssh...’
Bricktop had begun to sing. Her voice, small but beautifully true, tracing a vague pattern between song and speech, fitting itself to the sprung rhythms of a piano played by an old and dilapidated Negro, seemed to compose all by itself a sentiment at once nostalgic and fleeting, anonymous and personal, inside the song itself; her voice followed rather than obeyed the music, wreathing an audible arabesque around her; the melody, something banal by Berlin or Porter, was transformed and carried into a region where the heard became the overheard and the message one of enchanting sweetness and intimacy.
The polite ripple of applause seemed to infuriate Bob. ‘Christ, you’d think it was some leached-out phony like Alice Faye singing,’ he said. ‘These bastards don’t know what it’s all about. Balls, balls!’ he suddenly yelled. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, did you know you were dead? I’m speaking to you—yes, you collection of pukes and poops right over there. Just listen for a moment. I’m part of the show here. You’re getting my act for nothing.’
Someone began to laugh. This put Bob in a good humour. He stood up and bowed with extraordinary grace. ‘You, my friends, have the luck to be listening to an old-fashioned sot. I speak to you out of my subconscious. Some of you seem to be English: I hate the English. Some of you look like Americans: I hate you too. And if there are any Canadians among you, let me say that I hate all Canadians, only not quite so much as Yanks and Limeys.’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Beatrice Lillie. ‘The maple leap forever.’
‘Down with the maple leaf!’ cried Bob in a sudden fury. ‘Bugger the American eagle! This is the age of the rat and the weed, get that through your thick skulls! You’re being pushed out, boys, and I’m glad to see it. You’re nice and decorative, sure, you’ve got a nice way of brushing your hair, but you’ve got to go. It’s in the stars. The writing is on the outhouse wall—’
‘Now Bob,’ said Bricktop, sliding up to him. ‘Please Bob, you keep this clean. Come dance with me, honey, and we give all these people time to study out what you just said. Baby, that was a real message! Walter—music now, please. Shlo, huh?’
She pulled him onto the dance floor as the old Negro played the opening bars of Chloë. Bob, holding Bricktop at arm’s length in country style, flapped his feet awkwardly; the alcohol seemed to be at last affecting his balance. But when the music stopped he jumped back nimbly onto his stool, drained his glass and called for a whisky. Bricktop signed to Houston.
Bob downed half the fresh drink and stood up again. ‘I’m going to sing! This is an aria from my Chinese opera.’ He raised his arms, opened his mouth wide and began a hideous, wordless, toneless screaming. The effect was both absurd and painful; a dead silence fell over the room. Reeling against his stool, his head raised to the ceiling like a dog, yowling, he suddenly seemed to be no longer a drunken nuisance but a man who had gone mad; he was, I thought, actually either out of his mind or trying to become so. Suddenly he turned white, staggered, looked around wildly, and fell back into the arms of the big dinner-coated Negro who had appeared at the bar.
‘Gentlemen, you give me a hand with Mistah Bob, huh?’ said the bouncer jovially.
‘The taxi’s outside,’ said Bricktop. ‘Boys, we just done give him a little quietener. Nothing to hurt. He be all right in a half an hour. You give him my love when he wakes up.’
Bob was carefully carried out and lifted into the taxi.
‘Where’ll we go now?’ I asked Graeme.
‘We might get something to eat at the Coupole.’
Bob was still unconscious when we reached the Coupole. Lifting him out we saw a two-man bicycle patrol coming along the street. These police, whose job is to survey the city’s night life, are the oldest and most brutal of their kind, a different breed from the smirking, bowing, multilingual traffic police on the Right Bank. Remembering that neither Graeme nor I had identity cards, I felt my stomach turning over.
‘Ho, ho, what’s this?’ said the first policeman, stopping his bicycle.
‘It’s our friend,’ said Graeme quickly in English, gesturing. ‘An American, he’s a drunk, eever. Americain, eever.’
‘Oh ho! A drunken American, eh?’ He got off his bicycle, stepped up to Bob whom we were holding up, slapped his cheeks, felt his pulse, and fingered his clothes. ‘It’s an American, all right. They’re all Americans. This is not our affair. Good night, gentlemen.’
‘My God,’ I said. ‘Suppose we’d answered in French.’
‘I thought you were going to. That settles it, we’re going down to the Prefecture tomorrow and get identity cards. Now let’s get Mistah Bob into the bar.’
He was remarkably light and it was no trouble getting him through the double doors and onto one of the banquettes. I was arranging his hands over his chest when Gaston came running.
‘What have you done to him? Good God, he is not dead? He owes me three thousand francs!’
Bob began snoring loudly.
‘Thanks be to heaven,’ said Gaston. ‘What would you like to drink?’
‘Two orders of scrambled eggs and two large white coffees.’
When the food came Bob was still snoring, but his sleep was broken by the occasional groan or curse; the Mickey Finn was wearing off. His eyes, cavernous under the ragged eyebrows, began to open and close, his mouth to twitch. I put my hand on his forehead and found it covered with cold sweat.
‘Let’s try to get some brandy into him,’ said Graeme. ‘It can’t do any harm.’
‘He’s been drinking whisky for the last six hours, perhaps he shouldn’t change.’
He was already trying to sit up when Graeme put a glass of neat whisky under his long Barrymore nose. The reaction was immediate: his hand came up and knocked it to the floor.
‘Poison!’ he yelled. ‘No more poison! Give me some mother’s milk.’
Supported by Graeme’s arm around his shoulder he drank deeply from our jug of hot milk, shook his head like a dog, and then began to weep quietly.
‘Come on, Bob,’ I said. ‘We’ll take you home.’
‘I have no home. No home.’
‘Well then, where are you staying?’
‘I wouldn’t have a home if you paid me. Where’s my sister?’
‘Look, haven’t you got a hotel or something?’
‘I’m an exile.’ The tears were streaming down his cheeks.
They began turning out the lights in the bar.
‘We’d better take him back to the studio,’ said Graeme. ‘If we leave him here they’ll just put him out in the street.’
‘Come on, Bob,’ I said. ‘Let’s all go to our place.’
‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘Take me to the Fitzroy Tavern—Fitzroy Square, just around the corner.’
But he made no resistance when we supported him into a taxi. On the way to the rue Broca he seemed to fall asleep again and we carried him through the garden and into the studio. The first cold light of dawn was coming through the windows as we laid him on my bed, took off his shoes, jacket and tie and covered him with a blanket. Waking uncomfortably a few hours later, however, I found he had made his way between Graeme and me and I began to wonder if he had been quite as helpless as he appeared to be in the Coupole bar.