Read A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories for Free Online Page B

branches do, sociably, with murmurs welcoming it. Every midnight when Mr. Auerbach retired I ran to Montparnasse, and I was almost in love with Mina Loy, the famous muse, famous there then.
    One afternoon Mr. Auerbach and I came out of a great picture-dealer’s in the Rue de la Paix, and turned into the Place Vendome. He was very cheerful. We had gone to look at a little fifteenth- century Italian Madonna which, as it was described to him, he had expected to want badly; and he had been in a mixed emotion, telling himself that he ought to resist the temptation to buy it. But just now, with his binoculars on it, he had decided that it was not all it should be. This made him glad of the long time he had spent educating himself in matters of the Italian Renaissance; it had saved him money. And as he liked to feel that I was learning from him little by little, and in this issue I decidedly agreed with him, he was well disposed toward me too.
    He was smoking a cigar, wielding it in his strong small fingers, often moving it from here to there across his sensitive mouth, gesturing with it and pointing with it, enjoying it. He would smoke only the choicest variety of Havana cigar, imported by him as his chief self-indulgence. We had brought along upon our journey a small trunkful of them, which was troublesome for me; at every boundary between the absurdly narrow countries I had to declare their number and value and pay duty and keep an account of it. I remember that we had a few left upon our return to New York, and I amused myself by estimating what they were worth at that point, with the accumulated assessments—a matter of several dollars each.
    Mr. Auerbach liked to offer them to his friends, especially in Europe where during the War everyone had been deprived of such things. But I observed that he offered them only to the rich or the ex-rich. The poor, he assumed, would not have appreciated a blend so delicate. Even smoking, in the way his mind worked, was a thing to be made a study of, like art or like foreign affairs; and in all things the opinion of the professional and the expert was gospel. He himself smoked all day long, and Mrs. Auerbach was inclined to attribute the diminution of his eyesight to that; but she was far too sorry for him to discipline him. As diagnosed by famous oculists in Zurich and New York, the trouble was organic somehow; but for my part, thinking as usual on the basis of rash intuition, I decided that it might be mental or spiritual.
    There we were, that April afternoon, strolling around the Place Vendome, in no hurry, talking and smoking. I, in a spirit of economy, was trying to accustom myself to French cigarettes, and Mr. Auerbach jokingly promised to buy me something better; my rank little puffs beside him spoiled his fine smoke. We paused for a moment and gazed round at that small place which is (I think) the heart of Paris—that octagon of architecture standing with a strange lightness, apparently one-dimensional like a screen. I have always fancied that it could be overturned with a good hard push but that, in three centuries, no one has really touched it. Middle-class Parisians in their shabby garments with their regular steps hastened past us, preoccupied, unselfconscious, with an air of artists in their own studio; and a few upper-class Parisians and very similar foreigners went slowly into the Ritz.
    The sun was shining, but so diffusely that it cast only slight shadows; the form of the Colonne Vendome lay like a mere recollection or suggestion across the pavement. Yet it was too sunny for Mr. Auerbach; he had to shade his tragic eyes with one hand. He stood a moment in that attitude of looking at Paris; he drew a deep sigh; and he said, “I tell you, my boy, Paris is the most beautiful city in the world.”
    It struck me as odd and sad to hear a man who was half-blind pass judgment on the appearance of a city. But, I thought—I who had never seen this city before—what a vision of it