However, he had recovered the faculty of making his livelihood somehow or other as Petit Patou, which, he began desperately to feel, was all that mattered. His soul revolted, but his will prevailed. Elodie accompanied him in serene content, more flaccid and slatternly than ever in her hotel room, keenly efficient on the stage.
Now it happened that, a while later, during a visit to some friends in Shropshire who have nothing to do with this story, I broke down in health. I have told you before, that liaison work during the war had put out of action the elderly crock that is Anthony Hylton. Doctors drew undertakers' faces between the tubes of their stethoscopes as they jabbed about my heart, and raised their eyebrows over my blood pressure.
Just at this time I had a letter from Lackaday. Incidentally he mentioned that he was appearing in August at Clermont-Ferrand and that Horatio Bakkus (who, in his new prosperity, could afford to choose times and seasons) had arranged to accept a synchronous engagement at the Casino of Royat.
So while my medical advisers were wringing their hands over the practical inaccessibility and the lack of amenity of Nauheim, whither they had despatched me unwilling in dreary summers before the war, and while they were suggesting even more depressing health resorts in the British Isles, it occurred to me to ask them whether Royat-les-Bains did not contain broken-down heart repairing works of the first order. They brightened up.
"The place of all places,' said they.
"Write me a chit to a doctor there," said I, "and I'm off at once."
I did not care much about my heart. It has always been playing me tricks from the day I fell in love with my elder sister's French governess. But I did care about seeing my friend Lackaday in his reincarnation as Petit Patou, and I was most curious to make the acquaintance of Elodie and Horatio Bakkus.
Soon afterwards, therefore, behold me on my way to Clermont-Ferrand, of which manufacturing town Royat is a suburb.
Chapter XVIII
Without desiring to interfere with the sale of guide-books, I may say that Clermont-Ferrand is a great big town, the principal city of Auvergne, and devotes itself to turning out all sorts of things from its factories such as Michelin and Berguignan tyres, and all sorts of young lawyers, doctors and schoolmasters from its university. It proudly claims Blaise Pascal as its distinguished son. It has gardens and broad walks and terraces along the old ramparts, whence one can see the round-backed pride (with its little pip on the top) of the encircling mountain range, the Puy de Dôme; and it also has a wilderness of smelly, narrow little streets with fine old seventeenth-century mansions hidden in mouldering court-yards behind dilapidated portes cochères; it has a beautiful romanesque Church in a hollow, and, on an eminence, an uninteresting restored cathedral whose twin spires dominate the town for miles around. By way of a main entrance, it has a great open square, the Place de Jaude, the clanging ganglion of its tramway system, about which are situated the municipal theatre and the chief cafés, and from which radiate the main arteries of the city. On the entrance side rises a vast mass of sculpture surmounted by a statue of Vercingetorix, the hero of those parts, the gentleman over whose name we have all broken our teeth when learning to construe Cæsar "De Bello Gallico." Passing him by for the first time, I should have liked to shake hands with him for old times' sake, to show my lack of ill feeling.