“I like the Channel,” said Gaveston. “I should hardly believe I were abroad unless I first had that faint emetic odour of engine oil on the boat.”
“Delightful phantast!” laughed the peer. “But you’d be beautiful beyond even my dreams, Gav, suspended in the air betwixt the two most wonderful cities of the world. Not Gaveston, but Ganymede!”
The brilliant pair exchanged their fascinating ripostes throughout the journey. As soon as the white perfidious cliffs above Dover faded from their sight, they naturally fell into the French tongue. Both of course were perfect scholars in that languorous language: Vivian in fact was a past master of idiom: and both preferred when in la belle France (as they wittily called it) to be taken for natives of that vivacious and volatile country.
“Est-ce que vous avez Français sang?” asked Lord Vivian when he first realized how remarkable his young friend’s accent was.
“Qui sait?” Gav had replied enigmatically.
And so, what with esprit and persiflage, conte and shrug, it did not seem long ere the ambient vault of the Gare de Lyons had overarched their arrival with its Rhadamanthine gloom.
And then followed a passionate sequence of sleepless nights and sleepy days, while they visited all that there was of wicked and unvisited in the Ville Lumière, from multitudinous Montmartre to the quaint Quartier Latin, from Batignolles to Passy, from Nord to Sud. Where no other English had ever dared to penetrate, Vivian and Gaveston were often seen. The Comédie Française and the Folies Bergères grew to know them well, and thence they would pass from café to café and bouillon to bouillon, savouring a wild succession of the most Parisian of apéritifs—Dubonnet and Byrrh, Maggi and Thermogene, and in the very darkest of the cabarets of Montparnasse “les deux Anglais” became a familiar patchword.[15]
[15] A blot on Mr. Budd’s MS. here makes it doubtful whether this should not read “watchword,” “catchword,” or even “patchwork.” (Lit. Exec.)