Now, her whole mien no more changed after another great war than those of her daughters parading the Grands Boulevards, quickly restored with cosmetics after their own brief battles, murmuring, like them, — Vous m'emmenez?. . Paris prepared to celebrate an anniversary. It was her two thousandth anniversary, and that not one of birth, but of the first time, under another name, when she was raped: a morsel for a monarch, Lutetia succumbed after a struggle, and later on, like her daughters parading now between the Madeleine and the Café de la Paix, took a more gaudy name for her professional purposes, shrining the innocence of the maiden name in history.
Thus brilliant in flowered robes, like those Greek law decreed for courtesans, Paris soon gained the ascendancy, soon stood out like those prostitutes of Rome who, it was said, "could be distinguished from virtuous matrons only by the superior elegance of their dress and the swarm of admirers who surrounded them." As fashions have originated with courtesans throughout the ages, she soon became their arbiter. And since she was, like the better class of whores in ancient Greece, a trained entertainer, no more opprobrium attached to distinguished men visiting her than fell to Socrates visiting Aspasia: statesmen and generals came too, as Pericles came to Aspasia, and even after she had ruined him, and found herself accused of impiety, the great man appeared at her trial as her advocate, only to find his eloquence to fail him in court: "he could only clasp Aspasia to his breast and weep."
Other lands were not slow to credit her reputation as the author of all civilized innovations in the western world, and as much as five centuries ago the English, Italians, and even Turks, readily acknowledged that civilization had been enhanced with syphilis by the French. Paris exiled her overcivilized members across the river to Saint Germain des Prés, which had now once more become a haven for those crippled by novel and contagious disease. They behaved in this sanctuary very much as they had then, prohibited, as they were in the fifteenth century, "under pain of death, from conversing with the rest of the world."
On the terrace of the Flore, a passably dressed man who had compounded a new philosophy sat surrounded by some of the unshaven, unshorn, unwashed youth who espoused it. Four ruthlessly well-organized Hollanders, in the picturesque dress of their native land, sang Red River Valley from the sidewalk, and passed a cute wooden shoe among the captive audience. Someone whispered, — I'm actually going to join the church, the Roman Catholic. Someone else warned that the Pope and the whole works was going to Brazil. Someone else said that the Polar Icecap was growing, and would soon tip the earth over. Across the street on the terrace of the Brasserie Lipp, two pin-headed young men in gray flannel compared shiny green passports, thumbing forty-one blank pages. They were with two square-shouldered girls, whose small breasts were attached quite low to accommodate the fashion which the dresses imposed. One of the girls said, — I think my conçerage is returning all my mail marked ankonoo because I only gave her a thousand francs poorbwar. Behind them, another young man in gray flannels said he had known one of the girls, she was on the Daisy Chain at Vassar. On the terrace of the Reine Blanche next door, a golden-haired boy said, — I just want to say that being in Paris is a big fat wonderful thing. . and beside him a youth whose plume of hair stood uncombed with painstaking care laid a hand on his and said, — Be-t tout no ônelé etheur boïze frem dthe younaïtedd stétce in Paris is laïke kemming tout a bagnkouètt and bring yoûrze one lennch. On the terrace of the Royale Saint Germain, Hannah was to!d that a friend of hers was coining up from Italy, Don. . what-was-it? And she responded, — Hey diddle diddle It bends in the middle, can you buy me a beer?
— I heard they hung one of Max's pictures upside down at his show,
— So what, Hannah said and she sounded morose. — Nobody noticed it until today, it's a real compliment to the coherence of the design. She was sitting at a table with an Australian sculptor who made leather sandals, a colored girl in the Stuart tartan, and a professional Mexican, who looked blank. Hannah was staring at a ribbon of newspaper, with a note scribbled in the margin.
— Who was that guy Charles that Max was talking about? He said he finally made it? under a subway? that he held up the IRT for twenty-five minutes. .
— Will you shut up about it? Hannah responded, to amend her tone with, — and buy me a beer?
The Australian sculptor who made leather sandals said that Beethoven's duet for viola and cello sounded to him like two bulky women rummaging under a bed. Behind him a girl said, — Of course I like music, but not just to listen to.
— And you know how he paints them? He climbs up a ladder with a piece of string soaked in ink, and he drops it from the ceiling onto a canvas on the floor.
— We've just bought a lovely big Pissarro. .
— My uncle had one, it was so big he couldn't park it anywhere,
— Max got good write-ups on his show. The critic in La Macule said. .
— Why shouldn't he? Hannah interrupted. — They came around asking for a ten per cent cut on anything he sold if they gave him good reviews, sure he said yes, any good publicity agent charges ten per cent.
— Look, is it true what I heard about Max? that his mistress is the wife of… (and here the name of a well-known painter was whispered in Hannah's ear) —… who slips him her husband's unfinished canvases that he's discarded and forgotten about, and Max touches them up and sells them as originals?
— My uncle finally smashed it up one night, somebody on a motorcycle thought he was two motorcycles and tried to go between them.
— And then he told me he spent two days in bed with this real high-class whore he picked up in the Café de la Paix, after he told her he couldn't pay in francs, all he had was dollars, and he flashes this roll of tens and twenties and fifties, so she paid all the bills at the George Sank and gave him a terrific time for a couple of days and then rolled him, he said he'd like to see her trying to change Confederate States money in the Banque de France. What's this, a review of his book?
Hannah pushed the ribbon of paper forth saying, — The poor bastard who wrote it sends it over to him. Read it, you can see he misses the whole idea. Somebody in the Trib compared it to Nightwood.
— Here he comes now, isn't it?
Hannah looked up, to see Max approach, smiling; to ask, — Hey, can you buy me a beer?
At the next table a girl said, — Plagiary? What's that. Handel did it. They all did it. Even Mozart did it, he even plagiarized from himself, just look at the wind instruments in the dinner scene with Leporello. Someone said he'd been knocked down by a priest riding a bicycle with a red plush seat in the Rue Zheetliquer; someone said she had been knocked down by a nun on a bicycle in Rue Dauphine street: someone with a beard said he had never seen either a nun or a priest on the left bank, and added, — I just got a new holy man myself. — A what? — You know, an analyst. Have you been up to the exhibition of paintings by nuts up in the Saint Anne hospital? We got a nice section, the ones by American nuts. Some of them are dirty as hell.
And someone said, — Nothing queer about Carruthers… to conclude, once for all, the story of that subaltern and his mare.