The best secret places were always discovered by Mike Ward. He knew Paris and loved her better than anyone I knew. As soon as a Frenchman discovered a secret place he would give a huge party there to celebrate the secret. Mike and I hunted secret places that had one or two good small wines and had a good cook, usually a rummy, and were making a last effort to make things go before having to sell out or go into bankruptcy. We did not want any secret places that were becoming successful or going up in the world. That was what always happened with Charley Sweeny’s secret places. By the time he took you there the secret had been so revealed that you had to stand in line to get a table.
But Charley was very good about secret cafés and he had a wonderful security consciousness about his own and yours. These were of course our secondary or afternoon and early evening cafés. This was a time of day when you might want to talk to someone and sometimes I would go to his secondary café and sometimes he would come to mine. He might say he wished to bring a girl he wanted me to meet or I might tell him I would bring a girl. The girls always worked. Otherwise they were not serious. No one, except fools, kept a girl. You did not want her around in the daytime and you did not want the problems she brought. If she wanted to be your girl and worked then she was serious and then she owned the nights when you wanted her and you fed her evenings and gave her things when she needed them. I never brought many girls to show them off to Charley, who always had beautiful and docile girls, all of whom worked and all of whom were under perfect discipline, because at that time my concierge was my girl. I had never known a young concierge before and it was an inspiring experience. Her greatest asset was that she could never go out, not only in society, but at all. When I first knew her, as a locataire, she was in love with a trooper in the Garde Républicaine. He was the horse-tail plumed, medaled, mustached type and his barracks were not very far away in the quarter. He had regular hours for his duty and he was a fine figure of a man and we always addressed each other formally as “Monsieur.”
I was not in love with my concierge but I was very lonely at night at that time and the first time she came up the stairs and through the door, which had the key in it, and then up the ladder that led to the sort of loft where the bed was beside the window that gave such a lovely view over the Cemetery Montparnasse and took off her felt-soled shoes and lay on the bed and asked me if I loved her I answered, loyally, “Naturally.”
“I knew it,” she said. “I’ve known it too long.”
She undressed very quickly and I looked out at the moonlight on the cemetery. Unlike the Shamba she did not smell the same but she was clean and fragile out of sturdy but insufficient nourishment and we paid honor to the view which neither saw. I had it in my mind however and then she said that the last tenant had entered and we lay and she told me that she could never love a member of the Garde Républicaine truly. I said that I thought Monsieur was a nice man, I said
So I was thinking this about Paris while they were talking of London and I thought that we were all brought up differently and it was good luck we got on so well and I wished G.C. was not lonely nights and that I was too damned lucky to be married to somebody as lovely as Mary and I would straighten things out at the Shamba and try to be a really good husband.
“You’re being awfully silent, General,” G.C. said. “Are we boring you?”
“Young people never bore me. I love their careless chatter. It keeps me from feeling old and unwanted.”
“Balls to you,” G.C. said. “What were you thinking about with the semi-profound look? Not brooding are you or worrying about what the morrow will bring?”
“When I start worrying about what the morrow will bring you’ll see a light burning in my tent late at night.”
“Balls to you again, General,” G.C. said.
“Don’t use rough words, G.C.,” Mary said. “My husband is a delicate and sensitive man and they repugn him.”
“I’m glad something repugns him,” G.C. said. “I love to see the good side of his character.”
“He hides it carefully. What were you thinking about darling?”
“A trooper in the Garde Républicaine.”
“You see?” G.C. said. “I always said he had a delicate side. It comes out completely unexpectedly. It’s his Proustian side. Tell me, was he very attractive? I try to be broad-minded.”
“Papa and Proust used to live in the same hotel,” Miss Mary said. “But Papa always claims it was at different times.”