normal human beings when we are really in the last stages of nervous prostration. Visit the shady gambling dens, the blind bars, the houses of prostitution: when the dawn comes you will see all those night wanderers in the lowest depths of human misery; they cry, they grind their teeth, they kiss each other. The paint runs down the cheeks of the men and women. What can you expect? You can't always find shelter in theosophy or cocaine or speculation. Debauchery is a sure refuge only for the French who know enough not to abuse it."
An accordion had begun to play. Two German girls wearing soldier's caps danced together; in the waiting room the Jewish Black Bourse kept on changing marks all night—the almshouse of defeated currencies, of wounded exchanges, an invisible mont de Piété.
I think of the admirable pages on Germany at the end of Giraudoux's Siegfried et le Limousin[1]: "Pauvre grande nation qui n'est plus que chair, que poumons et digestion à jour et sans douce peau. . . ." Hugo von R——— raises a starved hand with mysterious gems on the thumb:
"'Obligé pour gagner le ciel d'invoquer la pharmacie et la sorcellerie,' Baudelaire dixit."
Hugo introduces me to a Polish girl with puffed cheeks and porcelain breasts; she is a jockey and rode last June in the Great Red Derby at Moscow. I ask her to dance; we both rise. But a fabulous iron roar bursts upon us, a thick smoke blots out the whole room: it is the Essen train coming into the station; driven by an engineer from the Midi, with eyes of coal, the red-robed locomotive traverses our dance-hall and cuts our first fox-trot into a thousand pieces.
The scene is in London, a great mansion in Carlton House Terrace. Who spoke of unemployment? The guests hurry over the Chinese rugs, smash the Chippendale settees, and in the antechamber a Longhi ballet is danced by candle-light. Percy S———, his monocle in his eye, is driven by his Irish-American humour to pursue the beautiful Russian refugees and murmur sadistically, "I've just come from Moscow. The old world is all gone. Nothing is left, nothing, I assure you."
- ↑ Admirably translated by Louise Collier Willcox under the title, My Friend From Limousin. Harper and Brothers, 1923.
