Paul Morand

“ Waldeck, Montgiscard, Marbot, and Léonardino, were nevertheless sincerely attached to Lewis. They admired him and considered him to have no equal in most fields. Certain people had, out of jealousy, tried to tread in his footsteps; it cost them dear; it was like sheep following a goat on to the ice and falling through owing to their greater weight. Lewis saw a great deal of his friends, or rather, to be accurate, was much sought by them. ”

“ She answered in a low constrained voice:—
"Of course."
She seemed so close that he could almost feel her breath. It left her lips in front of her words; in a tenth of a second it crossed the earth, as dead must talk to dead, coming across the rich soil land of Kent, over Dover Castle, beneath the chalky sea, up the Boulogne sands, along the capricious windings of the Seine, over the roofs of Paris, right up to Lewis' right ear. Lewis was struck with the clearness with which one heard at night, without any roaring or buzzing. ”

“ Irene was a great success. Paris did not lack business women, but they were all clever dressmakers, lucky actresses, shrewd concierges, publicity agents; they all worked clumsily, with no more originality than a cook making jam, their only aim being to make money, to be received in Society, and to entertain well-known men, thus showing the limitations of their ambitions.
Irene pleased people by her charm, her disregard of the technique of finance, her straightforward methods, her simple and imperious character. She was sought out by everyone; Lewis was never jealous. ”

“ Those dismal rooms furnished with "association pieces," those beds made for guilty passion in dimly-lit Louis XVI rooms, and which one sees lit up by motor head-lamps in the Faubourg Saint Honoré in the evenings, the delicate china which quivers at the change in the value of the pound sterling and the passing of omnibuses, all these things disgusted Lewis; he was disgusted by the little plump hands of the art experts, organizing the emigration of all this poor French furniture created for solitude, grace and modesty, and which would turn up again in the antipodes, probably upside down. ”

“ His name was Pastafina.
Lewis knew him of old.
"Why! Its Pastafina."
"Just now walking behind you hat in hand," said Pastafina, "I studied the shape of your head. In spite of everything you have the skull of an intelligent man; so I am going to talk seriously to you."
Signor Pastifina expressed himself with as many gestures as an Italian station master trying to make a train start (at least at the time when Italian trains never did start) . Not daring to smoke openly in the procession he hid his cigarette in the palm of his hand, like sentries on duty do. ”

“ English girls wearing imitation amber necklaces were going home, with novels bound in green cloth under moist armpits, accompanied by long limp youths who walked with bent knees, carrying their hats in their hands.
"Just now in that office you frightened me even more than you did in Sicily," said Lewis.
"And now?"
"Not so much now. When you are doing nothing you are much more like other women. I've often thought of you.... Are you romantic?"
"No, romance was invented by people who have no hearts. Personally, my thoughts have been of San Lucido." ”

“ Alone of all Eastern nations the Greeks seem to have struck the happy mean between sluggishness and fanaticism. It is a real feat. Lewis could not accomplish it. Secretly, so that Irene should know nothing of it, seated before this sea dotted with pointed sails, Lewis was disintegrating from sheer boredom. He was succumbing to Mediterranean anæmia, had chosen sluggishness, and was letting himself drift on in a torpor akin to an agreeable demise. ”

“ But Paris, self-centred Paris, always remains unmoved. International upheavals reach the Paris press agencies with an air of unreality; from there they find their way into the editorial offices and to the caricaturists, and thence to a laughing public which sings songs about them. The more intelligent people never open a paper. So that on leaving France one has more than at other times the impression of escaping at the right moment and taking a holiday from one's domestic happiness, and of avoiding the danger of living with a wife who is completely satisfying. ”

“ IX THE afternoon on which Lewis went to his florist to order the jasmin, chance, our worst enemy, brought Madame Magnac there, too. One cannot live in the closest intimacy with anyone for several years without acquiring a certain number of tradesmen in common. Elsie! In a flash she became again the plenipotentiary of pleasure, the woman at the same time stately and ludicrous, as elegant and up to date as ever; and everything else that Lewis wanted Irene to be, and which she was not. He stopped thinking that a legal wife is sufficient to console a man for all his mistresses. ”

“ His business sense was really nothing but a taste for adventure. He worked as he would have played, heedless of rules, selfishly, without giving a thought to the needs of the nation or of the period.
"I don't care a damn," he wrote to Martial, "for the inner meaning of things."
Lewis liked leaving France if he did not like leaving Paris; "this cosmoimpolitan," as Monsieur Vandémanque dubbed him, maintained that he felt far more bewildered beyond the fortifications of Paris than beyond the frontiers of France.
To leave one's country is the next best thing to coming back to it. ”

“ He stopped at the filthiest blind alleys where heaps of refuse consisting of squeezed-out lemons, dead rats, chicken feathers, old boots, grey hair and fish bones were fermenting together. Pigs slept beneath people's beds. Little herd boys, who were much too good looking, drove goats tied by the leg before them with long bamboos used for cleaning out drains, cursing in their Sicilian dialect full of Spanish words. A gentle breeze before the prison stirred the feathers of the Bersagliere sentries.
Lewis would have liked to fondle the children and the cats ”

“ There was nothing to keep the sky and the earth apart. The clean line of the coast and the sea like woven metal lost themselves in the distance. It was a fitting approach to the world of heroes and of gods who make love in the hollows of the sycamores. Lewis went below and entered Irene's cabin. ”

“ Lewis remarked on the beauty of their pearls. Irene explained that uncle Solon had rushed into a mad whirl of expenditure when confronted by the fall of the drachma; inasmuch as he had been thrifty all his life ("Don't handle things too much," he said; "a gold coin disappears altogether in eight thousand years") , now, feeling in his old age that the end of all economy, patrimony and capitalism was approaching, he disdained the arbitrary value of post-war money and never stopped repeating, sometimes in a frenzy and sometimes light-heartedly, "Spend the money, my children, spend the money!" ”

“ You are a pessimist, Lewis, without giving much thought to it, merely for the sake of convenience. One has no worries if one can persuade oneself that this world means nothing. You get annoyed because it doesn't amuse me to go to my dressmaker, because I refuse the slavery of a rope of pearls, because my attention wanders, so you say, when you talk to me about champagne vintages ”

“ Lewis wandered amongst them like a wild beast amongst a herd of cattle. He had to employ all his recovered violence to reimpose himself on them.
Work came back like a true friend: Irene put the finishing touches to his prosperity. Lewis reasserted himself and they were convinced that they would soon be as perfectly united in their work as they were in their love.
Different interests, earlier rising, hurried meals, these would all make the hours spent together more precious. Their pleasures would become escapades; their petty worries would gradually disappear. ”

“ There is no place for dreams in the counting-house homes of Greek bankers. The unexpressed devotion, the professional admiration, and the fraternal attachment which her two Apostolatos cousins had for her behind the granite walls of the Trieste mansion, in a strange atmosphere of strong room and harem, rendered precarious any form of compromise, at which, besides, she knew that she herself would never have been able to stop. ”

“ And yet, ever since those few words which he spoke to put an end to the conversation of that one evening, he had felt himself dominated, kept in check by an invisible will, by the emanations of a personality whose influence neither distance nor time could weaken. On the occasion of Pascal's centenary, Lewis had read in his diary some of the thoughts of that too little-known author. He remembered one: "The first effect of love is to inspire a profound respect." ”

“ Robust and full of life, the heirs in a blaze of candle-light, the Board of Directors and all the lesser employés of the Franco-African Bank abandoned themselves to their grief. Business men embarrassed by being brought face to face with nothingness at an hour when typewriters are usually clicking; bored society people turning their backs to the altar and scanning the assembly. ”

“ They want to get rid of all Greeks from Constantinople! They want to have Turkish commercial houses and Turkish banks! It's too funny!" [1]
Lewis followed Irene across the prayer rugs and Byzantine paving of Saint Sophia, dragging his feet shod in immense Turkish slippers like a man on skis, and trying to keep Irene quiet. He had never seen such an exhibition of contempt in the West; it was quite different to the aversion of French and Germans, who even in their most terrible moments remained human. Five centuries of the fiercest hatred shone in Irene's eyes. ”

“ The Grand Prix had been won by a Greek.
Lewis and Irene lived an Oriental life behind closed shutters. But they were no longer on an island, and some of the warm, ribald charm of the months gone by lingered in the empty streets, and when the tourists' chars-à-bancs had disappeared there remained in the air something eager, dexterous and precious, which Paris will always retain, even when there are no more Frenchmen to live there.
They saw no one. Irene disliked people. She never spoke to them. "In Paris," she said, "people always seem to be expecting you to surprise them. ”

“ What is amusing is to do business. Whether it is in shells or English bank-notes, or depreciated stock, it is all the same. One is put into this world to gamble."
It pleased Lewis to see his companion's face fall, though he was really very fond of him. He smiled, for he knew the secret mania of the Prince, which was to dabble in speculation. The more absurd it was the more it attracted him; Lewis did the same thing, but whereas he was invariably successful, Waldeck was ruining himself. ”

“ Irene remained powerless, her head on Lewis' knees, like a little Greek city intoxicated by its tyrant.
XI THUS Lewis realized that Irene, with all her pride, could not resist him. He thought "They say that modern women cannot find men; they will always find plenty to make love to them, but what they won't find is the man who has time to sit beside them and put his arm round them and say: 'Why are you unhappy?'"
What puzzled him was that this melancholy conversation, with its hint of rebellion, should have occurred at the very moment when he first began to drift away from her. ”

“ To go on living in Paris after the age of thirty one must accept being surrounded by complicity. Otherwise one must leave. Since Irene had agreed to come back to France, she must sooner or later get used to it.
Lewis used to think that the peccadillos which seemed to him necessary with women who only attracted him physically, would automatically cease if he ever really fell in love. He had counted without that eagerness to surpass ourselves which dominates us and which is perhaps nothing but habit disguised. ”

“ Lewis saw that beneath their ultra British exteriors, their lounge coats, buttonholes and fancy trousers of City men, he was dealing with Orientals, jealous, passionate, untutored, sons of men who had specialized in exactly the same kind of business for a century, negotiating it with tradition, patience and greed ”

“ Lewis' office was crammed with invoices and with memoranda vainly waiting for an answer. Irene was extremely generous in all her dealings ("Always give people plenty of rope," she said) , especially when it was a question of dealing with Greeks. One felt that between Greeks there immediately arose a sort of understanding and that certain kinds of treachery were impossible. Lewis, on the other hand, had to travel alone, sword in hand, his eyes wide open, always on the alert in that atmosphere of western finance where bad faith predominates. ”

“ Lewis, with feudal post-war pride, revolted from these slow methods: he was wrong. The union of politics and finance produce ugly children, but hardy ones.
"Irene," he used to say, "you represent monopolies and extortion."
"And you," she retorted, "stock jobbing and speculation."
Sometimes Lewis refused a transaction which it bored him to carry through. In this respect he was like a woman. Irene left nothing to chance; everything was grist that came to her mill. She did not forget that modern credit is the granddaughter of usury. She made use of other people's leavings. ”