That was a fine life that he had that year. He lived in a little hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts. He had a good room there which cost him twelve francs a day. It was a good hotel, and was the place where Oscar Wilde had died. When anyone wanted to see the celebrated death-room, he would ask to see “la chambre de Monsieur Veeld,” and Monsieur Gely, the proprietor, or one of his buxom daughters, would willingly show it.
At nine o’clock in the morning the maid would come in with chocolate or coffee, bread and jam and butter, which was included in the price of the room. She put it down on a little cabinet beside his bed, which had a door and a chamber pot inside. After she went out he would get up and move it to the table, and drink the chocolate and eat some bread and jam. Then he would go back to bed and sleep until noon and sometimes later: at one o’clock, Starwick and the two women would come to take him to lunch. If they did not come, they would send him a pneumatique telling him where to meet them. They went to a great many different places, but the lunch was always good. Sometimes they would send a pneumatique telling him to meet them at the Dome or the Rotonde. When he got there they would be sitting at a table on the terrace, and already very gay. Starwick would have a stack of saucers racked up before him on the table. On each saucer would be a numeral which said 3.50, or 5.00, or 6.00, or 7.50 francs, depending on what he had been drinking.
Usually it was cognac, but sometimes Starwick would greet him with a burble of laughter, saying in his sensuous and voluptuous voice: “Did you ever drink Amer Picon?”
“No,” he would say.
“Well,” said Starwick. “You ought to try it. You really ought, you know.” And the soft burble would come welling up out of his throat again, and Elinor, looking at him tenderly, smiling, would say:
“Francis! You idiot! Leave the child alone!”
Then they would go to lunch. Sometimes they went to a place near by called Henriettes which Elinor had known about when she was an ambulance driver in the war. Again they would cross the river and eat at Prunier’s, Weber’s, the Café Régence, Fouquet’s, or at a place halfway up the hill in Montmartre, which was in a square called the Place des Martyrs, and which was called L’Ecrevisse, probably because of a little
