night, have Iwondered if the day would ever come again when she would be
at my side; all those yearning looks I bestowed on the buildings and statues,
Ihad looked at them so hungrily, so desperately. that by now my thoughtsmust
have become a part of the very buildings and statues, they mustbe saturated
with my anguish. I could not help but reflect also thatwhen we had walked
side by side through these mournful, dingy streetsnow so saturated with my
dream and longing, she had observed nothing,felt nothing ; they were like
any other streets to her, a little moresordid perhaps, and that is all. She
wouldn't remember that at a certaincorner I had stopped to pick up her
hairpin, or that, when I bent downto tie her laces. I remarked the spot on
which her foot had rested andthat it would remain there forever, even after
the cathedrals had beendemolished and the whole Latin civilization wiped out
forever and ever.
    Walking downthe Rue Lhomond one night in a fit of unusual anguish and
desolation,certain things were revealed to me with poignant clarity. Whether
itwas that I had so often walked this street in bitterness and despairor
whether it was the remembrance of a phrase which she had droppedone night as
we stood at the Place Lucien-Herr I do not know. "Why don'tyou show me that
Paris, " she said, "that you have written about?" Onething I know, that at
the recollection of these words I suddenly realizedthe impossibility of ever
revealing to her that Paris which I had gottento know. the Paris whose
arrondissements are undefined, a Paristhat has never existed except by
virtue of my loneliness, my hungerfor her. Such a huge Paris! It would take
a lifetime to explore it a-gain.This Paris, to which I alone had the key.
hardly lends itself to a tour,even with the best of intentions; it is a
Paris that has to be lived,that has to be experienced each day in a thousand
different forms oftorture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and
grows andgrows until you are eaten away by it.
    Stumbling downthe Rue Mouffetard, with these reflections stirring in my
brain, I recalledanother strange item out of the past, out of that guidebook
whose leavesshe had asked me to turn but which, because the covers were so
heavy,I then found impossible to pry open. For no reason at all _ becauseat
the moment my thoughts were occupied with Salavin in whose sacredprecincts I
was now meandering_ for no reason at all, I say, there came to mind the
recollection ofa day when, inspired by the plaque which I passed day in and
day out.I impusively entered the Pension Orfila and asked to see the room
Strindberghad occupied. Up to that time nothing very terrible had befallen
me,though I had already lost all my worldly possessions and hadknown what it
was to walk the streets in hunger and in fear of the police.Up to then I had
not found a single friend in Paris, a circumstancewhich was not so much
depressing as bewildering, for wherever I haveroamed in this world the
easiest thing for me to discover has been afriend. But in reality, nothing
very terrible had happened to me yet.One can live without friends, as one
can live without love. or evenwithout money, that supposed sine qua non. One
can live in Paris_ I discovered that! _ on just grief and anguish. A bitter
nourishment_perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had
notyet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. Ihad
time and sentiment enough to spare to peep into other people's lives,to
dally with the dead stuff of romance which, however morbid it maybe, when it
is wrapped between the covers of a book, seems deli-ciouslyremote and
anonymous. As I was leaving the place I was conscious ofan ironic smile
hovering over my lips, as though I were saying to myself"Not yet. the
Pension Orfila! "
    Since then, ofcourse. I have learned what every madman in Paris
discovers sooner orlater; that there are no ready-made infernos tor the
tormented.
    It seems to meI understand a little better now why she took such huge
delight in readingStrindberg. I can see her looking up from her book after
reading a deliciouspassage, and. with tears of laughter in her eyes, saying
to me: "You'rejust as mad as he was.. . you want to be punished! "What a
delightthat must be to the sadist when she discovers her own proper
masochist!When she bites herself, as it were, to test the sharpness of her
teeth.In those days, when' I first knew her. she was saturated with
Strindberg.That wild carnival of maggots which he reveled in. that eternal
duelof the sexes, that spiderish ferocity which had endeared him to
thesodden oafs of the northland, it was that which had brought us
together.We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked
downinto the vortex that when I came to the surface again I

    could not recognizethe world. When I found myself loose the music had
ceased; the carnivalwas over and I had been picked clean. . .
    After leavingthe Pension Orfila that afternoon I went to the library and
there, afterbathing in the Ganges and pondering over the signs of the zodiac.
Ibegan to reflect on the meaning of that inferno which Strindberg hadso
mercilessly depicted. And, as I ruminated, it began to grow clearto me, the
mystery of his pilgrimage, the flight which the poet makesover the face of
the earth and then. as if he had been ordained to re-enacta lost drama, the
heroic descent to the very bowels of the earth, thedark and fearsome sojourn
in the belly of the whale, the bloody struggleto liberate himself, to
e-merge clean of the past, a bright, gory sungod cast up on an alien shore.
It was no mystery to me any longer whyhe and others (Dante, Rabelais, Van
Gogh, etc., etc. ) had made theirpilgrimage to Paris. I understood then why
it is that Paris attractsthe tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs
of love. I understoodwhy it is that here. at the very hub of the wheel, one
can embrace themost fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding
them inthe least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of
hisyouth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair.One
walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed. because itis only too
obvious that these cold. indifferent faces are the visagesof one's keepers.
Here all boundaries fade away and the world revealsitself for the mad
slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretchesaway to infinitude, the
hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant,with bloody cleaver
flashing. The air is chill and stagnant, the languageapocalyptic. Not an
exit sign anywhere; no issue save death. A blindalley at the end of which is
a scaffold.
    An eternal city.Paris! More eternal than Rome. more splen-dorous than
Nineveh. The verynavel of the world to which, like a blind and faltering
idiot, one crawlsback on hands and knees. And like a cork that has drifted
to the deadcenter of the ocean, one floats here in the scum and wrack of the
seas.listless, hopeless. heedless even of a passing Columbus. The cradlesof
civilization are the putrid sinks of the world, the charnel houseto which
the stinking wombs confide their bloody packages of flesh andbone.
    The streets weremy refuge. And no man can understand the glamorof the
streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until hehas become a
straw that is tossed here and there by every zephyr thatblows. One passes
along a street on a wintry day and. seeing a dog forsale, one is moved to
tears. While across the way, cheerful as a cemetery,stands a miserable hut
that calls itself "Hotel du Tombeau des Lapins." That makes one laugh, laugh
fit to die. Until one notices that thereare hotels everywhere, for rabbits,
dogs, lice. emperors cabinet ministers,pawnbrokers, horse knackers, and so on.
And almost every other one isan "Hotel de 'Avenir. " Which makes one more
hysterical still. So manyhotels of the future! No hotels in the past
participle, no subjunctivemodes, no conjunctivitis. Everything is hoary,
grisly, bristling withmerriment. swollen with the future, like a gumboil.
Drunk with thislecherous eczema of the future, I stagger over to the Place
Violet,the colors all mauve and slate, the doorways so low that only
dwarfsand goblins could hobble in; over the dull cranium of Zola the
chimneysare belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens
withcabbage ears to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful
bloatedtoads which squat by the roadside.
    Why do I suddenlyrecollect the Passage des Thermopyles? Because that day
a woman addressedher puppy in the apocalyptic language of the slaughterhouse,
and thelittle bitch, she understood what this greasy slut of a midwife
wassaying. How that depressed me! More even than the sight of those
whimperingcurs that were being sold on the Rue Brancion. because it was not
thedogs which filled me so with pity, but the huge iron railing, thoserusty
spikes which seemed to stand between me and my rightful life.In the pleasant
little lane near the Abattoir de Vaugirard (AbattoirHip-pophagique). which
is called the Rue des Perichaux. I had noticedhere and there signs of blood.
Just as Strindberg in his madness hadrecognized omens and portents in the
very flagging of the Pension Orfila,so, as I wandered aimlessly through this
muddy lane bespattered withblood, fragments of the past detached themselves
and floated listlesslybefore my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings.
I saw my ownblood being spilled, the muddy road stained with it, as far back
asI could remember, from the very beginning doubtless. One is ejectedinto
the world like a dirty little mummy ( the roads are slippery withblood and
no one knows why it should be so.Each one is traveling his own way and.
though the earth be rotting withgood things, there is no time to pluck the
fruits; the processionscrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic is
there, such a sweatto escape, that the weak and the helpless are trampled
into the mudand their cries are unheard.
    My world of humanbeings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world
and for friendsI had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad.
bitter languagecompounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted
effort.Passing under the viaduct along the Rue Broca. one night after I
hadbeen informed that Mona was ill and starving, I suddenly recalled thatit
was here in the squalor and gloom of this sunken street, terrorizedperhaps
by a premonition of the future, that Mona clung to me and witha quivering
voice begged me to promise that I would never leave her.never. no matter
what happened. And, only a few days later, I stoodon the platform of the
Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pullout, the train that was bearing
her away; she was leaning out of thewindow, just as she had leaned out of
the window when I left her inNew York. and there was that same, sad.
inscrutable smile on her face,that last-minute look which is intended to
convey so much, but whichis only a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile.
Only a few days before,she had clung to me desperately and then something
happened, somethingwhich is not even clear to me now, and of her own
volition she boardedthe train and she was looking at me again with that sad.
enigmatic smilewhich baffles me. which is unjust, unnatural, which I
distrust withall my soul. And now it is I, standing in the shadow of the
viaduct,who reach out for her. who cling to her desperately and there is
thatsame inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have clamped
downover my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no matter
howfervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is an
o-ceanbetween us; there she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk
fromone street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.
    It is that sortof cruelty which is embedded in the streets, it is that
whichstares out from the walls and terrifies us when suddenly we respondto a
nameless fear, when suddenly our souls are invaded by a sickeningpanic. It
is that which gives the lampposts their ghoulish twists,which makes them
beckon to us and lure us to their

    strangling gripi it is that which makes certain houses appear like the
guardiansof secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty sockets of
eyesthat have seen too much. It is that sort of thing, written into thehuman
physiognomy of the streets which makes me flee when overhead Isuddenly see
inscribed "Impasse Satan. "That which makes me shudderwhen at the very
entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is written:"Mondays and Thursdays
tuberculosis;
    Wednesdays andFridays syphilis. "In every Metro station there are
grinningskulls that greet you with " Defendez-vous contre la
syphilis!"Wherever there are walls, there are posters with bright venomous
crabsheralding the approach of cancer. No matter where you go. no matterwhat
you touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames
and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our soulsand we are
nothing but a dead thing like the moon.

    I- think it wasthe Fourth of July when they took the chair from under my
ass again.Not a word of warning. One of the big muck-a-mucks from the other
sideof the water had decided to make e-conomies; cutting down on
proofreadersand helpless little dactylos enabled him to pay the expensesof
his trips back and forth and the palatial quarters he occupied atthe Ritz.
After paying what little debts I had accumulated among thelinotype operators
and a goodwill token at the bistro acrossthe way. in order to preserve my
credit, there was scarcely anythingleft out of my final pay. I had to notify
the patron of the hotelthat I would be leaving; I didn't tell him why
because he'd have worriedabout his measly two hundred francs.
    "What II youdo if you lose your .job? "That was the phrase that rang in
my earscontinually. Co y est maintenant! Ausgespielt! Nothing to dobut to
get down into the street again, walk. hang around, sit on benches,kill time.
By now. of course, my face was familiar in Montpamasse ifor a while I could
pretend that I was still working on the paper. Thatwould make it a little
easier to bum a breakfast or a dinner. It wassumrnertime and the tourists
were pouring in. I had schemes up my sleevefor mulcting them. " What you do.
...? "Well, I wouldn't starve, that'sone thing. If I should do nothing else
but concentrate on food thatwould prevent me from falling to pieces. For a
week or two I could stillgo to Monsieur Paul's and have a square meal every
evening! he wouldn'tknow whether I was working or not. The main thing is to
eat. Trust toProvidence for the rest!
    Naturally, Ikept my ears open for anything that sounded like a little
dough. AndI cultivated a whole new set of acquaintances _ bores whom I had
sedulouslyavoided heretofore, drunks whom I loathed, artists who had a
littlemoney. Guggenheim-prize men. etc. It's not hard to make friends
whenyou squat on a terrasse twelve hours a day. You get to know everysot in
Montpamasse. They cling to you like lice. even if you have nothingto offer
them  but your ears.
    Now that I hadlost my job Carl and Van Norden had a new phrase for me:
"What if yourwife should arrive now? "Well, what of it? Two mouths to feed,
insteadof one. I'd have a companion in misery. And, if she hadn't lost
hergood looks, I'd probably do better in double harness than alone: theworld
never permits a good-looking woman to starve. Tania I couldn'tdepend on to
do much for me; she was sending money to Sylvester. I hadthought at first
that she might let me share her room, but she was afraidof compromising
herself; besides, she had to be nice to her boss.
    The first peopleto turn to when you're down and out are the Jews. I had
three of themon my hands almost at once. Sympathetic souls. One of them was
a retiredfur merchant who had an itch to _ see his name in the papers; he
proposedthat I write a series of arti- I cles under his name for a Jewish
dailyin New York. I had to scout " around the Dome and the Coupole
searchingfor prominent Jews. The first man I picked on was a celebrated
mathematician; he couldn't speak a word of English. I had to write about the
theoryof shock from the diagrams he left on the paper napkins; I had to
describethe movements of the astral bodies and demolish the Ein-steinian
conceptionat the same time. All for twenty-five francs. When I saw my
articlesin the newspaper I couldn't read them; but they looked impressive,
justthe same, especially with the pseudonym of the fur merchant attached.
    I did a lot ofpseudonymous writing during this period. When the big new
whorehouseopened up on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet. I got a little rake-off,
forwriting the pamphlets. That is to say, a bottle of champagne and a
freefuck in one of the Egyptian rooms. If I succeeded in bringing a clientI
was to get my commission, just like Kepi got his in the old days.One night I
brought Van Norden;
    he was goingto let me earn a little money by enjoying himself upstairs.
But whenthe madame learned that he was a newspaperman _;
    she wouldn'thear of taking money from him; it was a bottle of champagne
again anda free fuck. I got nothing out of it. As a mat- y ter of fact, I
hadto write the story for him because he couldn't think how to get roundthe
subject without mentioning the kind of place it was. One thing afteranother
like that. I was getting fucked good and proper.

    The worstjob of all was a thesis I undertook to write for a deaf and
dumbpsychologist. A treatise on the care of crippled children. My headwas
full of diseases and braces and workbenches and fresh air theories; it took
about six weeks off and on. and then, to rub it in, I hadto proofread the
goddamned thing. It was in French, such a Frenchas I've never in my life
seen or heard. But it brought me in a goodbreakfast every day, an American
breakfast, with orange juice, oatmeal,cream, coffee, now and then ham and
eggs for a change. It was theonly period of my Paris days that I ever
indulged in a decent breakfast,thanks to the crippled children of Rockaway
Beach, the East Side,and all the coves and inlets bordering on these sore
points.
    Then oneday I fell in with a photographer; he was making a collection
ofthe slimy joints of Paris for some degenerate in Mu-

    Inich. He wantedto know if I would pose for him with my pants down. and
in other ways.I thought of those skinny little runts. who look like bellhops
and messengerboys, that one sees on pornographic post cards in little
bookshop windowsoccasionally, the mysterious phantoms who inhabit the Rue de
la Luneand other malodorous quarters of the city. I didn't like very much
theidea of advertising my physiog in the company of these elite. But, sinceI
was assured that the photographs were for a strictly private collection,and
since it was destined for Munich, I gave my consent. When you'renot in your
home town you can permit yourself little liberties, particularlyfor such a
worthy motive as earning your daily bread. After all. I hadn'tbeen so
squeamish, come to think of it, even in New York. There werenights when I
was so damned desperate, back there, that I had to goout right in my own
neighborhood and panhandle.  We didn't go tothe show places familiar to the
tourists, but to the little joints wherethe atmosphere was more congenial,
where C we could play a game of cardsin the afternoon before getting down [_
to work. He was a good companion,the photographer. He knew \ the city inside
out, the walls particularly; he talked to me about Goethe often, and the
days of the Hohenstaufen,and the massacre of the Jews during the reign of
the Black Death. Interestingsubjects, and always related in some obscure way
to the things he wasdoing. He had ideas for scenarios too. astounding ideas,
but nobody

    had the courageto execute them. The sight of a horse, split open like a
saloon door,would inspire him to talk of Dante or Leonardo da Vinci or
Rembrandt; from the slaughterhouse at Villette he would jump into a cab and
rushme to the Trocadero Museum, in order to point out a skull or a mummythat
had fascinated him. We explored the th, the th, the th and theth
arrondissements thoroughly. Our favorite resting places werelugubrious
little spots such as the Place Nationale, Place des Peupliers,Place de la
Con-trescarpe. Place Paul-Verlaine. Many of these placeswere already
familiar to me, but all of them I now saw in a differentlight owing to the
rare flavor of his conversation. If today I shouldhappen to stroll down the
Rue du Chateau-des-Rentiers, for example,inhaling the fetid stench of the
hospital beds with which the th ar-rondissementreeks , my nostrils would
undoubtedly expand with pleasure, because,compounded with that odor of stale
piss and formaldehyde, there wouldbe the odors of our imaginative voyages
through the charnel house ofEurope which the Black Death had created.
    Through him Igot to know a spiritual-minded individual named Kruger, who
was a sculptorand painter. Kruger took a shine to me for some reason or other;
itwas impossible to get away from him once he discovered that I was
willingto listen to his "esoteric" ideas. There are people in this world
forwhom the word "esoteric" seems to act as a divine ichor. Like
"settled"for Herr Peep-erkorn of the Magic Mountain. Kruger was one ofthose
saints who have gone wrong, a masochist, an anal type whose lawis
scrupu-lousness, rectitude and conscientiousness, who on an off daywould
knock a man's teeth down his throat without a qualm. He seemedto think I was
ripe to move on to another plane, "a higher plane," as he put it. I was
ready to move on to any plane he designated, providedthat one didn't eat
less or drink less. He chewed my head off aboutthe "threadsoul, " the
"causal body, ""ablation, " the Up-anishads,Plotinus, Krishnamurti, "the
Karmic vestiture of the soul, ""the nirvanicconsciousness, " all that
flapdoodle which blows out of the East likea breath from the plague.
Sometimes he would go into a trance and talkabout his previous incarnations,
how he imagined them to be, at least.Or he would relate his dreams which, so
far as I could see, were thoroughlyinsipid, prosaic,

    hardly wortheven the attention of a Freudian, but, for him, there were
vast esotericmarvels hidden in their depths which I had to aid him to
decipher. Hehad turned himself inside out. like a coat whose nap is worn off.
    Little by little,as I gained his confidence, I wormed my way into his
heart. I had himat such a point that he would come running after me, in the
street,to inquire if he could lend me a few francs. He wanted to hold me
togetherin order to survive the transition to a higher plane. I acted like
apear that is ripening on the tree. Now and then I had relapses and Iwould
confess my need for more earthly nourishment _ a visit to theSphinx or the
Rue St. Apolline where I knew he repaired in weak momentswhen the demands of
the flesh had become too vehement.
    As a painterhe was nil; as a sculptor less than nil. He was a good
housekeeper,that say for him. And an economical one to boot. Nothing went to
waste,not even the paper that the meat was wrapped in. Friday nights he
threwopen his studio to his fellow artists; there was always plenty to
drinkand good sandwiches, and if by chance there was anything left over
Iwould come round the next day to polish it off.
    Back of the BalBullier was another studio I got into the habit of
frequenting _ thestudio of Mark Swift. If he was not a genius he was
certainly an eccentric,this caustic Irishman. He had for a model a Jewess
whom he had beenliving with for years; he was now tired of her and was
searching fora pretext to get rid of her. But as he had eaten up the dowry
whichshe had originally brought with her. he was puzzled as to how to
disembarrasshimself of her without making restitution. The simplest thing
was toso antagonize her that she would choose starvation rather than
supporthis cruelties.
    She was rathera fine person, his mistress; the worst that one could say
against herwas that she had lost her shape, and her ability to support
himany longer. She was a painter herself and. among those who professedto
know. it was said that she had far more talent than he. But no matterhow
miserable he made life for her she was just; she would never allowanyone to
say that he was not a great painter. It was because he reallyhas genius, she
said, that he was such a rotten individual. One neversaw her canvases on the

    wall _ only his.Her things were stuck away in the kitchen. Once it
happened, in my presence,that someone insisted on seeing her work. The
result was painful. "Yousee this figure, "said Swift, pointing to one of her
canvases with hisbig foot. "The man standing in the doorway there is just
about to goout for a leak. He won't be able to find his way back because his
headis on wrong. . . . Now take that nude over there .... It was all
rightuntil she started to paint the cunt. I don't know what she was
thinkingabout, but she made it so big that her brush slipped and she
couldn'tget it out a-gain. "
    By way of showingus what a nude ought to be like he hauls out a huge
canvas which hehad recently completed. It was a picture of her, a splendid
pieceof vengeance inspired by a guilty conscience. The work of a madman
_vicious, petty, malign, brilliant. You had the feeling that he had spiedon
her through the keyhole, that he had caught her in an off moment,when she
was picking her nose absent-mindedly, or scratching her ass.She sat there on
the horsehair sofa, in a room without ventilation,an enormous room without a
window; it might as well have been the anteriorlobe of the pineal gland.
Back of her ran the zigzag stairs leadingto the balcony; they were covered
with a bilious-green carpet, sucha green as could only emanate from a
universe that had been pooped out.The most prominent thing was her buttocks,
which were lopsided and fullof scabs; she seemed to have slightly raised her
ass from the sofa,as if to let a loud fart. Her face he had idealized: it
looked sweetand virginal, pure as a cough drop. But her bosom was distended,
swollenwith sewer gas; she seemed to be swimming in a menstrual sea, an
enlargedfetus with the dull, syrupy look of an angel.
    Neverthelessone couldn't help but like him. He was an indefatigable
worker, a manwho hadn't a single thought in his head but paint. And cunning
as alynx withal. It was he who put it into my head to cultivate the
friendshipof Fillmore, a young man in the diplomatic service who had found
hisway into the little group that surrounded Kruger and Swift. "Let himhelp
you, " he said. "He doesn't know what to do with his money. "
    When one spendswhat he has on himself, when one has a thoroughly good
time with hisown money, people are apt to say

    "he doesn't knowwhat to do with his money. " For my part. I don't see
any better useto which one can put money. About such individuals one can't
say thatthey're generous or stingy. They put money into circulation _
that'sthe principal thing. Fillmore knew that his days in France were limited;
he was determined to enjoy them. And as one always enjoys himself betterin
the company of a friend it was only natural that he should turn toone like
myself, who had plenty of time on his hands, for that companionshipwhich he
needed. People said he was a bore, and so he was, I suppose.but when you're
in need of food you can put up with worse things thanbeing bored. After all.
despite the fact that he talked incessantly,and usually about himself or the
authors whom he admired slavishly _such birds as Anatole France and Joseph
Conrad _ he nevertheless mademy nights interesting in other ways. He liked
to dance, he liked goodwines, and he liked women. That he liked Byron also,
and Victor Hugo,one could forgive; he was only a few years out of college
and he hadplenty of time ahead of him to be cured of such tastes. What he
hadthat I liked was a sense of adventure.
    We got even betteracquainted, more intimate, I might say, due to a
peculiar incident thatoccurred during my brief sojourn with Kruger. It
happened just afterthe arrival of Collins. a sailor whom Fillmore had got to
know on theway over from America. The three of us used to meet regularly on
theterrasse of the Rotonde before going to dinner. It was alwaysPernod, a
drink which put Collins in good humor and provided a base,as it were, for
the wine and beer and fines, etc. . which hadto be guzzled afterward. All
during Collins's stay in Paris I livedlike a duke; nothing but fowl and good
vintages and desserts that Ihadn't even heard of before. A month of this
regimen and I should havebeen obliged to go to Baden-Baden or Vichy or
Aix-les-Bains. MeanwhileKruger was putting me up at his studio. I was
getting to be a nuisancebecause I never showed up before three a. m. and it
was difficult torout me out of bed before noon. Overtly Kruger never uttered
a wordof reproach but his manner indicated plainly enough that I was
becominga bum.
    One day I wastaken ill. The rich diet was taking effect upon me. I don't
know whatailed me. but I couldn't get out of bed, I had lost all my
stamina,and with it whatever courage I possessed.