“He’s Spanish,” I said, “like Alfonso.” I stepped out of the car and cranked the starting handle and when I got back in again, Yasmin was tidying her hair in the car mirror. “I hate to say it,” she said, “but I rather enjoyed that one.”
“I know you did.”
“Phenomenal vitality.”
“Tell me,” I said, “is Monsieur Picasso a genius?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was very strong. He will be wildly famous one day.”
“Damn.”
“We can’t win them all, Oswald.”
“I suppose not.”
Matisse was next.
Yasmin was with Monsieur Matisse for about two hours and blow me if the little thief didn’t come out with yet another painting. It was sheer magic, that canvas, a Fauve landscape with trees that were blue and green and scarlet, signed and dated 1905.
“Terrific picture,” I said.
“Terrific man,” she said. And that was all she would say about Henri Matisse. Not a word more.
Fifty straws.
18
MY TRAVELLING CONTAINER of liquid nitrogen was beginning to fill up with straws. We now had King Alfonso, Renoir, Monet, Stravinsky, and Matisse. But there was room for a few more. Each straw held only one-quarter cc of fluid, and the straw itself was only slightly thicker than a matchstick and about half as long. Fifty straws stacked neatly in a metal rack took up very little room. I decided we could accommodate three more batches on this trip, and I told Yasmin we would be visiting Marcel Proust, Maurice Ravel, and James Joyce. All of them were living in the Paris area.
If I have given the impression that Yasmin and I were paying our visits more or less on consecutive days, that is wrong. We were, in fact, moving slowly and carefully. Usually about a week went between visits. This gave me time to investigate thoroughly the next victim before we moved in on him. We never drove up to a house and rang the bell and hoped for the best. Before we made a call, I knew all about the man’s habits and his working hours, about his family and his servants if he had any, and we would choose our time with care. But even then Yasmin would occasionally have to wait outside in the motor car until a wife or a servant came out to go shopping.
Monsieur Proust was our next choice. He was forty-eight years old, and six years back, in 1913, he had published Du Cóté de chez Swann. Now he had just brought out A l’Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. This book had been received with much enthusiasm by the reviewers and had won him the Goncourt Prize. But I was a bit nervous about Monsieur Proust. My enquiries showed him to be a very queer duck indeed. He was independently wealthy. He was a snob. He was anti-Semitic. He was vain. He was a hypochondriac who suffered from asthma. He slept until four in the afternoon and stayed awake all night. He lived with a faithful watchdog servant called Céleste and his present address was an apartment at No. 8 bis rue Laurent-Pichet. The house belonged to the celebrated actress Réjane, and Réjane’s son lived in the flat immediately below Proust, while Réjane herself occupied the rest of the place.
I learned that Monsieur Proust was, from a literary point of view, totally unscrupulous and would use both persuasion and money to inspire rave articles about his books in newspapers and magazines. And on top of all this, he was completely homosexual. No woman, other than the faithful Céleste, was ever permitted into his bedroom. In order to study the man more closely, I got myself invited to a dinner at the house of his close friend Princess Soutzo. And there I discovered that Monsieur Proust was nothing to look at. With his black moustache, his round bulging eyes, and his baggy little figure, he bore an astonishing resemblance to an actor on the cinematograph screen called Charlie Chaplin. At Princess Soutzo’s, he complained a lot about draughts in the dining-room and he held court among the guests and expected everyone to be silent when he spoke. I can remember two incredible pronouncements he made that evening. Of a man who preferred women, he said, “I can answer for him. He is completely abnormal.” And another time I heard him say, “Fondness for men leads to virility.” In short, he was a tricky fellow.