[II]
MADAME MAGNAC was not the least of these.
Lewis upbraided her for surrounding herself with armorial bindings and greyhounds; for giving people wines so old that they had gone bad; food so cooked that there was nothing left of it. For being a slave to appearances, for having one of those Christian names that age with the years, which is serious, but which do not age with their bearers, which is awful. For being afraid of divorce for provincial reasons, disguised behind the bigotry of the Faubourg Saint Germain. He began to hate her drawing-room, which looked like a room on the Classic stage. He prated of purity: Madame Magnac retorted, not inappropriately, that women are what men make them. He was irritated with her misquoting Taoist philosophers, with her beginning to wear a tired look (she looked like a shop-soiled book fading in the window); with her wealth of which she made no worthy use; with her pre-war figure; with her salon which was nothing but a society clinic; with her snobbishness, which classed and unclassed her; with her proud bearing, which disguised a thousand weaknesses; with her artistic taste, which was really nothing but a form of vigilance—which to a certain extent everyone possesses; with her jadishness, the distribution of her favours (all the more because she did not even trouble to keep her infidelities from him); with her telegrams to crowned heads, with the inevitable replies from their secretaries; with her lies and her habit of calling the Duc de Vendôme by his Christian name when he wasn't there; with her lack of candour and charm; with her pretensions to exoticism, continually taking things up and dropping them again; with her Marcel waves; with her tiaras of kingfisher feathers, which gave her the grotesque and ridiculous appearance of an Arlesian effigy; with her bath sunk into the floor; with her mania for being in the midst of everything whilst pretending to live the life of a recluse; with her way of answering when anyone asked if she intended to be present at a party to which she had not been invited: "I really cannot, I have had to go on strike."
[III]
LEWIS lived alone. He took his meals in his room, went to bed at nine o'clock and pulled the bedclothes over his head the better to isolate himself; he pursued his thoughts without much result, but at any rate with honesty. He began to find limitations in himself. Was he good, or only pitiless?
He was aware of having changed, of no longer being what he had been a year before at that time. So that, without quite having lost confidence in himself, he was no longer sure that he could do anything he liked and that anything could either be bought or seized. He began to ask himself of what use he was in this world. Every time he met a good woman who avoided his gaze his heart seemed to falter.
[IV]
FROM a taste for poverty, Lewis began to spend a great deal of money.
No longer furnishing his house according to his needs, he began to decorate it according to a definite scheme. Artistic objects had cluttered up his room like old iron in the liberated regions of France. He turned them all out. He began to study the best periods of art. Aided by his instincts, he soon passed through the lower stages, coming back to first principles by abstract methods, like all Modernists. He grasped the fact that an age like our own is great enough to disregard tradition.
He no longer visited the shops to which Madame Magnac used so often to take him after lunch. He avoided those old curiosity shops which had grown up since the war, like cheap eating houses round a racecourse. From the insipidity of the by-products of the eighteenth century, which hung their sky-blue bows in the Rue la Boétie, alarmed by the propinquity of negro masks, and jostled by the rigid interpretations of Cubist masters, to the farmhouse furniture of the Boulevard Raspail which was handed over to specially bred worms to eat, passing by the German antiquaries of the Place Vendôme where our rickety fifteenth-century Madonnas dwell in shivering captivity. Those dismal rooms furnished with "association pieces," those beds made for guilty passion in dimly-lit Louis XVI rooms, and which one sees lit up by motor head-lamps in the Faubourg Saint Honoré in the evenings, the delicate china which quivers at the change in the value of the pound sterling and the passing of omnibuses, all these things disgusted Lewis; he was disgusted by the little plump hands of the art experts, organizing the emigration of all this poor French furniture created for solitude, grace and modesty, and which would turn up again in the antipodes, probably upside down.