tomorrow."
"Kospoth. Blaise Javier Kospoth."
He gave me a dismissive nod and turned to step into the car.
"I don't really need a ride," I said to his back. "I'll be fine walking."
As the Mercedes slid away effortlessly into the traffic his long pale face flashed at me through the window like a ceremonial knife.
I stood for a moment in the cold night air, contemplating the brightly lit arch of a Métro entrance half a block away. Then I jammed my hands in my pockets and started to walk toward the theatre district, where I knew there would be a cab. And for no reason at all, except that I saw the signpost again, I said aloud, "Funny coincidence that the old man on the rue Bonaparte was born in Grenoble, isn't it, Toby? Where Vaucanson was born?"
At the sound of my voice a dark shape on the sidewalk turned and I recognized the imposing figure of Elsie Short's comrade on the stage, the German toymaker Henri Saulnay.
"I enjoyed your presentation tonight, Monsieur," I said in French. "Most informative and entertaining."
He inclined his big head slightly.
"You would know a good deal about Jacques de Vaucanson." I pointed at the street sign. "Given your profession, I suppose."
There was a big red metal disk hanging from the next street lamp a few yards further on, the Parisian sign in those days for a
bus stop. He craned his head to look at an approaching Number 92 bus, which of course didn't go anywhere near the rue du Dragon.
"I know very little about him," he said, "no."
"Vaucanson's famous duck," I said. "According to our mutual friend Miss Short, it was destroyed in a fire back in the eighteenth century. But Robert Houdin made a replica around 1880. She wants to copy it as a toy for the Edison Company."
The big green bus came hissing and bumping to a halt twenty feet away, headlights blazing. Henri Saulnay smiled very faintly and started toward it. "If that's what she told you," he said.
Thirteen
I T'S IMPOSSIBLE NOW , I SUPPOSE , to say what Paris really looked like in 1926 or 1927.
The old newsreels wash it all out into a grainy, flickering black-and-white metropolis that appears faintly comic, decidedly quaint—the narrow streets around the Place de la Concorde, built for horse-drawn carriages, crowded with old-fashioned black cars and omnibuses; women in cloche hats and bobs, wearing long beaded necklaces and flapper dresses so short they had to powder their knees; grinning men in funny straw hats and moustaches, all of them going across the screen with the odd, jerky motions that Mr. Edison's cameras always gave them, somehow making a whole city walk like Charlie Chaplin.
It was probably an advertising man who first called the twenties the "Jazz Age," a term without much meaning for the seven or eight million young French widows and orphans the Great War had left behind in its wake, or the dozens of legless, armless, or sightless young veterans I passed every day on my way to work, sprawled
on the sidewalk, wearing the "Mutilé de Guerre" placards that a compassionate government had issued as their license to beg. The French themselves afterwards called it "Les Années Folles," the Crazy Years, which might have been better. Nobody ever called it the Age of Reason.
"Do you speak German?"
Bill Shirer leaned across the table and studied me with his usual faintly humorless intensity.
"Not a word." I was having coffee and a cigarette, the soldier's breakfast, according to Remarque, and he was still mopping up the remains of a very handsome omelette aux fines herbes, which had cost, my treat, the rough equivalent of a nickel.
"I thought maybe, since you were in the war, and saw a lot of the Germans, and Root said . . ."
"I was trying to kill them, Bill, not open a salon."
"I know, I just thought—I'm studying German now,
"Kospoth. Blaise Javier Kospoth."
He gave me a dismissive nod and turned to step into the car.
"I don't really need a ride," I said to his back. "I'll be fine walking."
As the Mercedes slid away effortlessly into the traffic his long pale face flashed at me through the window like a ceremonial knife.
I stood for a moment in the cold night air, contemplating the brightly lit arch of a Métro entrance half a block away. Then I jammed my hands in my pockets and started to walk toward the theatre district, where I knew there would be a cab. And for no reason at all, except that I saw the signpost again, I said aloud, "Funny coincidence that the old man on the rue Bonaparte was born in Grenoble, isn't it, Toby? Where Vaucanson was born?"
At the sound of my voice a dark shape on the sidewalk turned and I recognized the imposing figure of Elsie Short's comrade on the stage, the German toymaker Henri Saulnay.
"I enjoyed your presentation tonight, Monsieur," I said in French. "Most informative and entertaining."
He inclined his big head slightly.
"You would know a good deal about Jacques de Vaucanson." I pointed at the street sign. "Given your profession, I suppose."
There was a big red metal disk hanging from the next street lamp a few yards further on, the Parisian sign in those days for a
bus stop. He craned his head to look at an approaching Number 92 bus, which of course didn't go anywhere near the rue du Dragon.
"I know very little about him," he said, "no."
"Vaucanson's famous duck," I said. "According to our mutual friend Miss Short, it was destroyed in a fire back in the eighteenth century. But Robert Houdin made a replica around 1880. She wants to copy it as a toy for the Edison Company."
The big green bus came hissing and bumping to a halt twenty feet away, headlights blazing. Henri Saulnay smiled very faintly and started toward it. "If that's what she told you," he said.
Thirteen
I T'S IMPOSSIBLE NOW , I SUPPOSE , to say what Paris really looked like in 1926 or 1927.
The old newsreels wash it all out into a grainy, flickering black-and-white metropolis that appears faintly comic, decidedly quaint—the narrow streets around the Place de la Concorde, built for horse-drawn carriages, crowded with old-fashioned black cars and omnibuses; women in cloche hats and bobs, wearing long beaded necklaces and flapper dresses so short they had to powder their knees; grinning men in funny straw hats and moustaches, all of them going across the screen with the odd, jerky motions that Mr. Edison's cameras always gave them, somehow making a whole city walk like Charlie Chaplin.
It was probably an advertising man who first called the twenties the "Jazz Age," a term without much meaning for the seven or eight million young French widows and orphans the Great War had left behind in its wake, or the dozens of legless, armless, or sightless young veterans I passed every day on my way to work, sprawled
on the sidewalk, wearing the "Mutilé de Guerre" placards that a compassionate government had issued as their license to beg. The French themselves afterwards called it "Les Années Folles," the Crazy Years, which might have been better. Nobody ever called it the Age of Reason.
"Do you speak German?"
Bill Shirer leaned across the table and studied me with his usual faintly humorless intensity.
"Not a word." I was having coffee and a cigarette, the soldier's breakfast, according to Remarque, and he was still mopping up the remains of a very handsome omelette aux fines herbes, which had cost, my treat, the rough equivalent of a nickel.
"I thought maybe, since you were in the war, and saw a lot of the Germans, and Root said . . ."
"I was trying to kill them, Bill, not open a salon."
"I know, I just thought—I'm studying German now,
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