"I have to decline a game of billiards, and refuse a cigar, a very formidable cigar, very black and very thick and very long. I don't smoke, and am no hand at a cue. Besides, I want to talk about Étoiles Mortes, about Les Trépassées de François Villon, about Déjanire et Dalila!
"M. Josselin speaks French as he writes it, in absolute perfection; his mother, he tells me, was from
"'HE PRESENTS ME FIRST TO MADAME JOSSELIN'"
Normandy—the daughter of fisherfolk in Dieppe; he was at school in Paris, and has lived there as an art student.
"He does not care to talk about Les Trépassées or Les Étoiles, or any of his immortal works.
"He asks me if I'm a good swimmer, and can do la coupe properly; and leaning over his billiard‑table he shows me how it ought to be done, and dilates on the merits of that mode of getting through the water. He confides to me that he suffers from a terrible nostalgia—a consuming desire to do la coupe in the swimming‑baths of Passy against the current; to take a header à la hussarde with his eyes open and explore the bed of the Seine between Grenelle and the Île des Cygnes—as he used to do when he was a school‑boy—and pick up mussels with his teeth.
"Then he explains to me the peculiar virtues of his stove, which is almost entirely an invention of his own, and shows me how he can regulate the heat of the room to the fraction of a degree centigrade, which he prefers to Fahrenheit—just as he prefers metres and centimetres to inches and feet—and ten to twelve!
"After this he performs some very clever tricks with billiard‑balls; juggles three of them in each hand simultaneously, and explains to me that this is an exceptional achievement, as he only sees out of one eye, and that no acrobat living could do the same with one eye shut.