Part 2 — IV

FROM a taste for poverty, Lewis began to spend a great deal of money.

No longer furnishing his house according to his needs, he began to decorate it according to a definite scheme. Artistic objects had cluttered up his room like old iron in the liberated regions of France. He turned them all out. He began to study the best periods of art. Aided by his instincts, he soon passed through the lower stages, coming back to first principles by abstract methods, like all Modernists. He grasped the fact that an age like our own is great enough to disregard tradition.

He no longer visited the shops to which Madame Magnac used so often to take him after lunch. He avoided those old curiosity shops which had grown up since the war, like cheap eating houses round a racecourse. From the insipidity of the by-products of the eighteenth century, which hung their sky-blue bows in the Rue la Boétie, alarmed by the propinquity of negro masks, and jostled by the rigid interpretations of Cubist masters, to the farmhouse furniture of the Boulevard Raspail which was handed over to specially bred worms to eat, passing by the German antiquaries of the Place Vendôme where our rickety fifteenth-century Madonnas dwell in shivering captivity. 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.