Part 2 — VII

SOME time after this Lewis went to supper with a famous Champagne merchant who, in spite of his age and a rather assailable position, still financed a good number of charming little ladies.

After crossing one of those streets in the Champ de Mars which seem to be cut in butter, Lewis entered a little house at an hour when there were no longer any servants about: anyone who liked could go in by the open door. Unlike the Magnac Salon, it was an unfashionable house, in other words an amusing one, full of pretty women and good vintage wine (that pink 1911, like disguised raspberry syrup), and where no expense was spared for the entertainment of the guests; even to the extent of having gifts beneath every napkin. The host was celebrating that evening the thirtieth anniversary of a secret malady which had not interfered with his tempestuous mode of life. To this party, of which Paris had been talking for weeks, he had invited all the specialists who had treated him during these thirty years, and even the lady to whom he owed what was, after all, so little worry, and whom he discovered at Laval where she ran a church furnishing shop. She sat opposite him at the head of his table, wearing a bonnet and a dress of Alençon lace.

Lewis was at the daffodil table (each table being named after a colour), next to Hector Lazarides who was sucking at his Homard à l'Americaine and wearing a helmet with a nose-piece which made him look like the Greeks of Pericles in Duruy's manual. Lazarides was an old Greek parasite who, after twenty centuries, still remained the Gnatho of ancient comedy, and who lived in an attic facing the Tuileries in a hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. A gay old sentimental corsair, he hawked things about, looked after his friends' wives and took them out, stayed in bed when he had no victims, "fallen between two mugs," he used to say, or, "in the dead season," and if by some oversight he was asked down to the country he never left. (To such a point that the Prince de Waldeck had to have the wing in which he had put him up for one night pulled down after two years in order to get rid of him.) He was always asking people to find him something to do. When anyone offered him a job he would refuse with dignity, saying: "I can make more than that by borrowing." An impecunious old snob, he had only abandoned the scepticism of a lifetime at the sight of his fallen monarch, whom he set about serving with a guilty fervour. But even this did him no good, because far from his Francophobia strengthening his social position in Paris, as it generally does. Fate willed that people should frown on it; so that he was thenceforth, like this evening, forced to spend the night amongst the higher strata of commerce.

He could not be too civil to Lewis, taking off his helmet, bowing his head on which three hairs still curled like electric bell wires. Lewis brought the conversation round to Greece and to Irene.

"But I knew her quite well as a child!" cried Lazarides, "at Aix, at Nauheim, at Zalzomazziore (he exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness the lisp that Trieste Greeks have borrowed from the Venetians). She used to look after her father, a choleric old gentleman who was always blackguarding his servants and distributing five franc pieces amongst the little ladies who called him 'papa.' I saw her again as a young girl in Rome. There she married Pericles Apostolatos who, following the Greek custom, was old enough to be her father; he was at school with me at Condorcet. He killed himself two years ago after some unsuccessful speculations. As he was only a trustee, his personal fortune passed to the creditors; but as Irene is a modern young woman she went into business with the help of her cousins, paid her husband's debts and built up his fortune again; now, as you probably know, she is practically the head of the Apostolatos Bank. Such a thing is unheard of in the history of Greece. She is a thoroughly excellent girl and she hasn't had much of a time. Brought up in our old school. You Parisians have no idea of what that means, what an awful thing youth can be, shut up in those huge Oriental houses whose doors never open save to admit the cephalonite priest who comes to teach the Pistevo, our creed, and then a premature marriage, often by proxy."

"And yet," said Lewis, "I have met young Greek girls at Marseilles, playing tennis on the courts in the Avenue de la Cadenelle...."

"The Marseilles Greeks are middle-class people who try to make themselves pleasant to the French and to marry into the local families. There is no connection between these and ancient Hellenic strongholds like Trieste. There the aristocracy is closely hedged round, impenetrable, and no misalliances are possible. They will have none of the little dowry-hunting Italian Counts, and they marry big black satyrs who talk through their noses and, grunting like pigs, make huge wedding presents, of Viennese taste, to their brides. It's nothing to laugh at. Think of these charming little girls going off with their languorous eyes to conquer the gambros, the betrothed, followed by their families—those Greek families which move all together like migratory sardines in the Mediterranean: abruptly to be shown the secret of life, and then to be worn out with motherhood and submerged for ever."

Having spoken, Lazarides blew into a little limp skin which he had in the palm of his hand, and this became a green duck which took flight over the table with a penetrating scream and was killed by someone with a fork.

The conversation was interrupted by a stag hunt through the house in which the manager of a big bank in the Place Vendôme took the rôle of the stag with the pegs from the hat rack. It ended in a porphyry bath where the hard-pressed animal and taken refuge, the tails of his coat floating amongst the strawberries which the hot water had made it impossible for him to retain.

When the party broke up at dawn, their feet sunk in the rainy pavement beneath the Eiffel Tower slumbering above the clouds, Lazarides went home charged with an important mission which he alone could bear to Trieste, by those mysterious primitive telepathies of the Greeks, which are the wonder of the western world: Lewis, after some very bitter moments, had resigned himself to begging to inform that he was ready to negotiate and to give up part or, if necessary, the whole of the mines of San Lucido.

What reply would he get to these overtures?