when I dined out, in tails and a white tie, as was
then the custom, I went and came back by bus.
I was asked to spend week-ends in the country.
They were something of a trial on account of the tips
you had to give to the butler and to the footman who
brought you your morning tea. He unpacked your
gladstone bag, and you were uneasily aware that your
well-worn pyjamas and modest toilet articles had made
an unfavourable impression upon him. For all that,
I found life pleasant and I enjoyed myself. There
seemed no reason why I should not go on indefinitely
in the same way, bringing out a novel once a year
(which seldom earned more than the small advance the
publisher had given me but which was on the whole
respectably reviewed), going to more and more parties,
making more and more friends. It was all very
nice, but I couldn’t see that it was leading
me anywhere. I was thirty. I was in a rut.
I felt I must get out of it. It did not take me
long to make up my mind. I told the friend with
whom I shared the flat that I wanted to be rid of
it and go abroad. He could not keep it by himself,
but we luckily found a middle-aged gentleman who wished
to install his mistress in it, and was prepared to
take it off our hands. We sold the furniture
for what it could fetch, and within a month I was on
my way to Paris. I took a room in a cheap hotel
on the Left Bank.
A few months before this, I had been fortunate enough
to make friends with a young painter who had a studio
in the Rue Campagne Premiere. His name was Gerald
Kelly. He had had an upbringing unusual for a
painter, for he had been to Eton and to Cambridge.
He was highly talented, abundantly loquacious, and
immensely enthusiastic. It was he who first made
me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures
had recently been accepted by the Luxembourg.
To my shame, I must admit that I could not make head
or tail of them. Without much searching, I found
an apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the
Lion de Belfort. It had two rooms and a kitchen,
and cost seven hundred francs a year, which was then
twenty-eight pounds. I bought, second-hand, such
furniture and household utensils as were essential,
and the concierge told me of a woman who would
come in for half a day and make my cafe au lait
in the morning and my luncheon at noon. I settled
down and set to work on still another novel.
Soon after my arrival, Gerald Kelly took me to a restaurant
called Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d’Odessa, near
the Gare Montparnasse, where a number of artists were
in the habit of dining; and from then on I dined there
every night. I have described the place elsewhere,
and in some detail in the novel to which these pages
are meant to serve as a preface, so that I need not
here say more about it. As a rule, the same people
came in every night, but now and then others came,
perhaps only once, perhaps two or three times.
We were apt to look upon them as interlopers, and
I don’t think we made them particularly welcome.
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