Lucky Martial! Little did he dream of this life when Lewis made his acquaintance on the Eastern front on a lovely shell-strewn spring morning in 1915 (another of his geographic adventures). A doctor of philosophy and an ex-cowboy, Martial, at the age of forty-two, had volunteered for active service in the same regiment as Lewis, and at the age of forty-six he had volunteered for service with Lewis himself. He was devoted to him, not because Lewis deserved it at all, but because he had taught him how to live. This fellowship of the trenches carried on into civilian life, such an attachment of a simple soul for a more complex being, had been unheard of since the First Empire. Martial slept at the office, kept the accounts and had not had an hour's holiday in four years. (It was hardly a holiday to have to console all the fair ladies abandoned by Lewis.) He clung to Lewis like a screen photographer to his star. He was quite happy. Lewis paid him a large salary, which he won back from him at poker every month.
"By the way. Martial, I've got some news. Report to me at dawn and I'll tell you all about it."
Having said this, Lewis went home.
[VI]
LEWIS went home. He wanted to be alone. His dinner consisted of a cup of coffee. He went to bed and his head threw a big shadow on the ceiling.
Opening a drawer he took out a red notebook, in which he kept a register of all the women he had loved....
On and on they go, yielding, passionate, credulous, sad, too well fed or half starved. Highly strung and easily bored, Lewis jumped from adventure to adventure with the rapidity of a cinematograph, until he could hardly distinguish between the minor characters and the stars. And yet he would have been shocked at being called fickle. Women: he wanted them all the time, why, he didn't know. He wanted them to study their profiles, to load them with presents, to make them drunk, to cultivate their intelligence, to debauch them, to mould their characters, to get rid of them, to work off his irritation on them, to stay in bed for days instructing them in foreign literature, to avoid eating alone, to wake him up, to get him out of scrapes, to try to get at the truth about them, to travel with them. Particularly to travel with them. It is then that they are most attractive and in their best temper. For do not journeys begin with clothes and end with more clothes? And there is the feeling of infidelity to so many towns, so many people, so many countries. There are as many different pleasures as there are different sheets on the various beds.
Would he go to Sicily alone? It was essentially a journey to be made with a woman. Something rather capricious, a lovely little animal—"Has been in several famous collections," as they say in the auction catalogues. Exquisite hands and feet, and who would talk about herself all the time, would lose the keys of her luggage, write her name in the moisture on the windows and expect one to get out at each station to buy her "souvenirs" of the country.
No, he would go alone.
Lewis very seldom slept, just a few hours, perhaps, towards the dawn. The house was quite quiet. Outside it was raining. Three o'clock struck. Time to start work. He took from beneath his pillow "A Treatise on the Possession of the Subsoil in European Countries: Italy.... Code Napoléon, Recconi law, March 18th, 1873."