After the strong dazzling colors of Morocco, Paris that spring appeared something like the melody of larks chanting over a gray field. It was over three years since I had seen the metropolis. At that time it had a political and financial trouble hanging heavy round its neck. Now it was better, with its head up and a lot of money in every hand. I saw many copies of my book, Banjo, decorating a shop window in the Avenue de l'Opéra and I was disappointed in myself that I could not work up to feeling a thrill such as I imagine an author should feel.
I took a fling at the cabarets in Montparnasse and Montmartre, and I was very happy to meet again a French West Indian girl whom I knew as a bonne in Nice when I was a valet. We ate some good dinners together and saw the excellent French productions of Rose Marie and Show Boat and danced a little at the Bal Negre and at Bricktop's Harlem hang-out in Montmartre.
I found Louise Bryant in Paris. It was our first meeting since she took my manuscript to New York in the summer of 1926. The meeting was a nerve-tearing ordeal. About two years previously she had written of a strange illness and of doctors who gave her only six months to live and of her determination to live a long time longer than that. She had undergone radical treatment. The last time I had seen her she was plump and buxom. Now she was shrunken and thin and fragile like a dried-up reed. Her pretty face had fallen like a mummy's and nothing was left of her startling attractiveness but her eyebrows.
She embarrassed me by continually saying: "Claude, you won't even look at me." Her conversation was pitched in a nervous hysterical key and the burden was "male conceit." I told her that the female was largely responsible for "male conceit." Often when I had seen her before she had been encircled by a following of admirably created young admirers of the collegiate type. Now she was always with an ugly-mugged woman. This woman was like an apparition of a male impersonator, who was never off the stage. She had a trick way of holding her shoulders and her hands like a gangster and simulating a hard-boiled accent. A witty Frenchman pronounced her a Sappho-manqué. The phrase sounded like a desecration of the great glamorous name of Sappho. I wondered why (there being so many attractive women in the world) Louise Bryant should have chosen such a companion. And I thought that it was probably because of the overflow of pity pouring out of her impulsive Irish heart.
I remembered, "Aftermath," the beautiful poem which she sent us for publication in The Liberator after John Reed died. Now it seemed of greater significance:
AFTERMATH
Dear, they are singing your praises,
Now you are gone.
But only I saw your going,
I ... alone ... in the dawn.
Dear, they are weeping about you,
Now you are dead,
And they've placed a granite stone
Over your darling head.
I cannot cry any more,
Too burning deep is my grief....
I dance through my spendthrift days
Like a fallen leaf.
Faster and faster I whirl
Toward the end of my days.
Dear, I am drunken with sadness
And lost down strange ways.
If only the dance could finish
Like a flash in the sky.... Oh, soon,
If only a storm could come shouting—
Hurl me past stars and moon.
And I thought if I could not look frankly with admiration at Louise Bryant's face, I could always turn to the permanently lovely poem which she had created.