Mrs. Emily invited the homeless youth to be her guest, and he was glad to accept. Here was a comfortable place to stay, and quiet friendship to smooth his ruffled plumage. His hostess was nearing sixty, and with her white hair was a dignified and impressive figure. In her home he met mostly French people; and oddly enough, cultivated Frenchmen paid very little attention to his revolt. The French are a well-insulated people, and seldom bother to know what is going on outside their own world unless it is forced upon them. Disputes and disagreements among the American staff? Yes, they are a rather violent people; their cinema reveals it; they still have wild Indians, don't they? The French would shrug their shoulders.
Lanny was a man of leisure, with time to stroll on the boulevards and watch the sights of a great city and reflect upon them. He himself didn't realize to what extent his point of view had changed; how different his reflections from what they would have been a year ago. For example, the painful spectacle of the women of Paris. In the early days of the Peace Conference you hardly saw a spot on the Champs-Йlysйes where a person could sit that didn't have a doughboy with a French girl in his lap; now, when the doughboys were disappearing, the competition among the women had become ravenous. Three or four would sight Lanny at once, and come to him swiftly, each looking ready to tear the eyes out of her rival; when he politely told them in good French that he was living a chaste life, their enmity to one another would vanish, and they would gaze mournfully after him, saying: "Oh, but life is hard for the women!"
Six months ago, Lanny would have attributed all this to natural depravity, of a sort peculiar to the Gallic race; he would have recalled some phrases which M. Rochambeau had quoted from Tacitus, censuring the moral code of that race in its then barbaric state. But now Lanny had the phrases of Stef and his Uncle Jesse in his mind. His attention had been called to the fact that municipal authority under the stress of war had set the wages of French workingwomen at six francs per day; whereas to go into a restaurant and have a poor dinner would cost one of them at least seven. Yes, it was the stark, simple fact that hunger was driving them to sell their bodies; hunger was driving the poor of Europe to madness, and making the ferocious class struggles.
What about the .women of more prosperous classes, so many of whom were selling themselves for silk gowns, fur coats, and jeweled slippers? "Well," Lanny could hear his uncle saying, "aren't these the tools of their trade?" The gentle and refined scholars whom Woodrow Wilson had brought to Paris were appalled at the behavior of females who wore the clothes of ladies and had been expected to behave that way: females of all nations, American included, some of them in Red Cross costumes. In the Crillon order was maintained, but in other hotels they peddled themselves from door to door like book agents. The shocked professors repeated a story about the American Ambassador to Belgium, who was lodged in the ultra-magnificent Palace Hotel of Brussels, owned by the King of Spain. Said the ambassador to his friends: "It is the custom in European hotels to leave your boots outside the door, to be gathered up by the porter and polished in the early morning hours. So I have bought myself a pair of ladies' shoes, and every night I place them outside my door along with my own boots!"
VIII
There were other aspects of life in Paris less depressing. There were theaters with more to show than troupes of naked women. There were concerts, to remind one that the life of the spirit still continued. Most interesting to Lanny was the spring salon in the Petit Palais. To think that in the midst of the last desperate agony of war, with several "Big Berthas" dropping shells into the city every twenty minutes, with food scarce and fuel unobtainable, more than three thousand men and women had sat at easels and maintained their faith that art could not be destroyed, but was and would remain the supreme achievement and goal of life!
Lanny went to this show day after day. There were many kinds of paintings, many subjects, many techniques; he studied them, and tried to understand what the artist was telling him. Beauty had had three of Marcel's last works brought to Paris, and they had been hung; Lanny now compared them with the work of other men, and confirmed his opinion that there was nothing better being shown. You could see how the crowds felt, for there were always people looking at Marcel's work, and asking questions concerning the painter. Not many knew about him, but they were going to; that would be one of Lanny's tasks, and his mother's - when she came back from her new honeymoon.
