Robert. ·He had saturnine, not to say satanic, features but he was as benign as Victor. By the time I came to know him I had found a job and was reasonably solvent but I usually managed to run out of money before pay day.
‘Robert, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it but we are getting towards the end of the month.’
‘En effet , cher ami, en effet’ and Robert would place his wallet on the table and go about his business. I would help myself and ten minutes later Robert would return, pick up his wallet and pocket it. He never looked to see what I had taken and he never asked me. Australian and English acquaintances brought up on the myth of the miserly French would gape unbelievingly at these transactions. They would ask whether the operation was a comedy put on for their benefit. It was not. It was Paris, my Paris.
The Coupole’s clientele was a bizarre conglomeration of types. First thing in the morning, most of the customers were as down at heel as I was and like me came along for the hot water and the newspapers. Towards lunchtime, you got a better class of people—writers and artists but prosperous ones, young businessmen talking with restrained excitement about advertising and manpower charts, politicians (nobody much cared for them), film producers and bank managers. These drifted away in the course of the afternoon and at about five o’clock were replaced by elderly ladies (‘Nos monuments historiques’, as Robert sardonically called them) wearing portentous hats and drinking tea.
None of the newspaper offices was situated in the vicinity but journalists crossed the city at all hours of the day or night to drink at the Coupole. I formed a lasting friendship with one of them. There was every reason why it shouldn’t have lasted because Alain’s brand of humour could frequently make one want to scramble for the nearest place of concealment.
Once when we were having what I had thought would be a quiet drink together he suddenly, without warning, began to upbraid me in shrill and disconcertingly audible tones.
‘I’ve given you the best years of my life,’ he screeched, ‘I’ve given you tenderness, devotion—yes, and money, too, only you know how much! And now that you’ve taken everything from me, my heart, my youth, my little income, you desert me for that horrible, hateful Maurice! Oh, it’s so cruel! How could you do it to me, how, how, how?’
By this time, he had an attentive audience of some five hundred people.
‘I’ll never forgive you, you hateful boy! Never, do you hear me?’
Like any other cocky twenty-five-year-old, I’d always imagined that I was indifferent to what the multitude might think of me. Alain rapidly convinced me that I was mistaken.
‘Beast, beast, beast!’ he screamed. Everybody in the place, including the waiters, was following the scene with fascination.
‘Listen, Alain, you son of a bitch. If you don’t stop this bullshit I swear I’ll walk out right now and leave you with the bill.’
‘Maurice of all people! He’s nothing but a little tart. Don’t you realise that he’s only after your money?’
‘All right—I warned you.’ Wincing under the concentrated gaze of the other customers, I got up and prepared to leave.
I had underestimated Alain. Grabbing my hand so that I was unable to pull away, he raised his voice several decibels and threw himself into his role with still more intensity. ‘No, no, don’t leave me, don’t leave me! I’ll kill myself if you desert me. I tell you I’ll kill myself and I’ll kill Maurice first. Have you no pity? Dear God, must it end like this?’
The suicide threat was attracting even more attention than the preceding performance. There was only one way to stop it. I sat down again. Alain at once resumed his wailing. ‘Maurice! I wouldn’t have believed it. If only it had been some other boy I wouldn’t have minded so much. But Maurice!’
It was some time before I had the nerve to return to a place which I’d come to regard as my second, indeed my only, home. The Coupole really became itself at night. I might have only enough for my usual cup of coffee but its long brightly lit glass façade was marvellously cheering. It loomed in the dark like a gigantic funfair. I felt no rancour at the sight of customers gobbling up their meals. Quite the reverse. Somehow I had the sensation that I was eating just as well as they were. And once inside, there were invigorating smells from the kitchen and a convivial clinking of glasses, an irresistible animation.
You might not have a franc in your pocket but it was impossible to be downcast in the Coupole.
It was at night that all the different categories of customer were jumbled together—the riff-raff to which I belonged, the businessmen, the film producers and the historical monuments and, like a parade of harlequins, the various crackpots and fantasts in which Paris then abounded.
At infrequent intervals these would include Raymond Duncan, Isadora’s fatuous brother. Piously ‘Greek’, he wore his hair down to his shoulder blades and was at all times clad in a robe woven for him by a group of dopey handmaidens who incomprehensibly allowed themselves to be exploited by him. He was a grotesque figure but his masquerade had been going on for so long that he had ceased to amuse anyone. We disdained him as an intruder. He had no recognised corner of his own. Indeed, he never sat down at all. When he paid one of his occasional visits, he would simply stalk around among the tables visibly and vainly craving attention and possibly hoping that someone would buy him a drink. I never saw anyone do so.
Monsieur de Beauharnais (nobody ever disputed his entitlement to this name) was a vastly different personage. He gave the impression of being permanently out of humour. Perhaps he was. He certainly did all he could to indicate that he would have been infinitely happier living under the First Empire. It might almost be said that he was living under the First Empire. His costume—top boots, frockcoat, fancy waistcoat and tall hat—was precisely what the well-dressed man was wearing in 1810. Cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ greeted his arrival in the Coupole. Monsieur de Beauharnais took these manifestations of imperial fervour as a perfectly normal civility which he acknowledged with a graceful nod to left and right. He would then sit down and extracting from his pocket a copy of Le Moniteur or some other paper of his preferred period would catch up on the latest news from the Austerlitz or Wagram front. You could tell how the Emperor’s campaigns were progressing from the expression on Monsieur de Beauharnais’s face as he read his paper. It was pitiful to see him during the retreat from Moscow.
I counted myself among Monsieur de Beauharnais’s followers but I had a slight prejudice in favour of Ferdinand Lop, another of the mad wags to be seen most evenings at the Coupole. He was renowned as an indefatigable candidate for the presidency of the Republic. The only time I regretted that I was ineligible to vote in France was when I listened to Ferdinand Lop expounding his program at the Coupole. If elected, he proclaimed, he would at once initiate two major reforms: the suppression of all poverty after 10.00 pm (although, situated as I was, I would rather he had fixed the hour somewhat earlier) and the extension of the Boulevard St Michel to the coast.
Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter were about equally divided between intransigent followers of Lop—Lopistes, as they were known—and no less resolute opponents, the Antilopes. I was a thoroughgoing Lopiste. How could one fail to support the only man pledged to extend the Boulevard St Michel to the coast?
When more than ordinarily moved by Lop’s discourses at the Coupole, we Lopistes spontaneously burst into the Lopiste hymn. It was sung to the tune of ‘Jingle Bells’ and the words left no doubt whatever as to our sentiments:
‘Lop, Lop, Lop,
Lop, Lop, Lop,
Lop,
