Is not the question of entertaining a good deal like the question of other people's wealth? If you are continually striving to keep up with friends richer than you, you are bound to feel poor. We could put our heads out of our window, and pity ourselves because we were not living in steam-heated, electric-lighted Number Nineteen or Number Twenty-Three. But then, across the street, Number Twenty and Number Eighteen had logements beside which our apartment was a palace.
Shortly after setting up our Lares and Penates in Number Twenty-One, a friend from Denver dropped in just before supper. He was a judge and silver-mine owner, the father of one of my Bryn Mawr college-mates. I urged him to stay. He was excusing himself, when I volunteered the information that our supper consisted of cornmeal mush with milk, and that was all. He stayed, and told us that it was the best meal he had eaten in Paris. "I just love cornmeal mush, and I cannot get it at my hotel," he said. We believed him. He spoke the truth.
There was always room at our table for friends. An extra plate, and a little more of what we were having for ourselves—that was all there was to it. In a big city, especially a city like Paris where shops are in every street, getting more food quickly is no problem. Herbert would just slip downstairs to Sempé's for eggs, another chop, another can of peas, an additional bottle of wine. Next door was the bakery.
The best friends of our married life have come to us through unpretentious entertaining. The contact of the home is different from the contact of the office or club or formal gathering, and it has enabled me to take every step forward with my husband. Our broadened vision, our intimate sources of information, the steps upward in our profession are largely the result of the dinner-table and the after-dinner smoke before the fire. One illustration shows how chance influences the whole life.
Early in the autumn of 1909, we received a letter from a Paris lawyer who had just returned from settling insurance claims in massacre-stricken Cilicia. He had been in Tarsus just after we left, and wanted to meet us. I wrote back to him, as I would have done to anyone with an introduction like his, "Come to dinner, and if there is a Mrs. K. bring her with you." He sought us out in our little street. There was no Mrs. K., but the spontaneity of the invitation and its inclusiveness had prompted him to break his rule of not accepting dinner invitations. He was a charming man, full of information and inspiration. When I brought on the asparagus, he said that in Poland they put burnt bread crumbs into drawn-butter sauce. I jumped right up, and exclaimed, "Nothing easier! We shall have asperges à la polonaise right away." In three minutes the asparagus was to his taste. The lawyer thought out, and made a suggestion that would certainly never have occurred to him had I arranged a formal meeting in response to his letter. He told us that the experience we had in Turkey we should not regard as accidental. "Why did the massacres occur? You must have asked yourselves that. Now drop your research into Gallicanism and French ecclesiastical history. A thousand men are as well equipped for that as you. Turn your attention to the Turks and the Eastern Question, and from that go into the study of the contemporary diplomacy of Europe. The Russian and Hapsburg Empires are built upon the Ottoman Empire. Study the relation of Turkey to Poland. This is the field for you!"
In the last few years I have often thought of that evening. We followed the lawyer's advice. He helped us. He encouraged us. He used to come to dinner every Tuesday night. We went back to Turkey and came again to Paris before the Great War. During the years of absence, there had been frequent correspondence. When we returned, the Tuesday evenings were resumed. If my husband was ready for the work that came to him with the war, it is thanks to the Paris lawyer. The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire, The New Map of Europe, The Reconstruction of Poland and the Near East, are the outcome of table-talks with the lawyer that began in the Rue Servandoni.
In the pension of the Rue Madame we met people whom we invited to come to see us in the Rue Servandoni. We asked them to our table. They came. And they have been dinner guests in our different Paris homes during the past decade.
There was the Catholic Archbishop of Cairo, an Arab who had the story-telling gift of his race. You do not know what it is to hear a story told until you have listened to an Arab. The Archbishop unfolded to us the lore of the East. There must have been something about les petits américains that interested him, for our meals could not compete with Mademoiselle Guyenot's. He used to sit in the steamer-chair, with his arms folded over his gold crucifix, his cape thrown back on both shoulders (which gave a dash of red), the end of a long white beard rubbing the most prominent buttons of his cassock front, and eyes twinkling in unpriestly fashion. He was the reincarnation of Nasreddin Hodja, prince of Anatolian story-tellers. Herbert pokes in his bath. One night, when Scrappie went to sleep earlier than usual, Herbert started to make his ablutions before the dining-room fire while I was busy in the kitchen. The door-bell rang. In came the archbishop. There was a swift change of persons and rooms. Herbert finished his bath in the kitchen in an incredibly short time. He did not want to miss a moment of the archbishop.
Michi Kawai was with me in school as well as in college. Imagine my delight at finding her one day looking at old furniture in the Rue des Saints-Pères. If I ever thought of Michi, it was in Tokio. And I never would have thought of Michi in connection with French antique furniture. But that is Paris for you. Sooner or later all your friends come to Paris. You run across them accidentally and invariably they are doing something you would never have dreamed of associating them with. During her months in Paris Michi was a frequent visitor in the Rue Servandoni. She was one of those delightful combinations of Occident and Orient that Japan produces better than any other nation. She was equally at home with French and American friends, and, when Emilie was not there, knew how to juggle my eight cups and saucers and spoons back and forth between the tea-table and the kitchen, without guests catching on, more dexterously than any of my American girl friends.