arrived, without a cent to his name. It was a long and bitter period, three of us in a small room again, but at least an honest three. Louis's French temperament ran to absinthe--when he could get it. He used the mattress on the floor, while Kay and I shared the bed between us. Our clothes were useless to the short, rotund little Frenchman; as the weeks passed he looked more and more like a pantomime figure in the streets, and when he went to give his rare French and Spanish lessons he never dared to take off his overcoat (which he had managed to keep) even in the hottest room, nor during the most torrid of summer days. Often he dared not unbutton the collar he turned up about his neck, affirming with much affected coughing that he had a "dreadful throat." He was, by nature and habit, an inveterate cigarette smoker; a cigarette, indeed, meant more to him than a meal, and I can still see him crawling about the floor of the room on all fours in the early morning, "hunting snipe," as he called it--in other words, looking for fag-ends. He was either extremely sanguine or extremely depressed; in the former mood he planned the most alluring and marvellous schemes, in the latter he talked of suicide. His wife, whom he dearly loved, had a baby soon after his arrival. He suffered a good deal....
He was a great addition to our party, if at the same time a great drain on our purse. His keen, materialistic French mind was very eager, logical, well-informed, and critical in a destructive sense, an iconoclast if ever there was one. All forms of belief were idols it was his great delight to destroy; faith was superstition; cosmogonies were inventions of men whose natural feebleness forced them to seek something bigger and more wonderful than themselves; creeds, from primitive animism to Buddhism and Christianity, were, similarly, man-made, with a dose of pretentious ethics thrown in; while soul, spirit, survival after death, were creations of human vanity and egoism, and had not a single atom of evidence to support them from the beginning of the world to date. Naturally, he
disbelieved everything that I believed, and, naturally,
