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By Root 752 0

the place of here. Perhaps he thought that he was merely shaking my hand, as no doubt he thought that he was merely seeing a Senegalese soldier who passed in the darkness without deigning to notice that he was being admired. But in each case the Baron was mistaken, the intensity of contact and of gaze was greater than propriety permitted. “Don’t you see all the Orient of Decamps and Fromentin and Ingres and Delacroix in this scene?” he asked me, still immobilised by the passage of the Senegalese. “As you know, I for my part am interested in things and in people only as a painter, a philosopher. Besides, I am too old. But how unfortunate that to complete the picture one of us two is not an odalisque!”

It was not the Orient of Decamps or even of Delacroix that began to haunt my imagination when the Baron had left me, but the old Orient of those Arabian Nights which I had been so fond of; losing myself gradually in the network of these dark streets, I thought of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid going in search of adventures in the hidden quarters of Baghdad. The weather was warm and my walk had made me hot and thirsty, but the bars had all closed long ago and, because of the scarcity of petrol, the rare taxis which I met, driven by Levantines or negroes, did not even take the trouble to respond to my signs. The only place where I might have been able to get something to drink and rest until I felt strong enough to walk home would have been a hotel. But in the street, rather remote from the centre of the town, to which I had penetrated, every hotel, since the Gothas had begun to drop their bombs on Paris, had closed. The same was true of almost all the shops, the shopkeepers, either owing to lack of staff or because they had taken fright themselves, having fled to the country and left on their door a handwritten notice announcing in some conventional phrase that they would re-open at a distant date (though even that seemed problematical). The few establishments which had managed to survive announced in the same fashion that they were open only twice a week. One felt that poverty, dereliction, fear inhabited the whole quarter. I was all the more surprised, therefore, to see that among these abandoned houses there was one in which life seemed, on the contrary, to have been victorious and terror and bankruptcy to have yielded to activity and wealth. Behind the closed shutters of each window the lights, dimmed on account of police regulations, revealed nevertheless a complete disregard for economy. And at every moment the door opened to allow some fresh visitor to enter or leave. It was a hotel which, because of the money its proprietors must be making, could not fail to have aroused the envy of all the neighbouring tradespeople; and I too became curious when, at a distance of fifteen yards, that is to say too far off for me to be able to make him out clearly in the profound darkness, I saw an officer come out and walk rapidly away.

Something, however, struck me: not his face, which I did not see, nor his uniform, which was disguised by a heavy greatcoat, but the extraordinary disproportion between the number of different points which his body successively occupied and the very small number of seconds within which he made good this departure which had almost the air of a sortie from a besieged town. So that my mind turned, if I did not explicitly recognise him—I will not say even to the build, nor to the slimness or the carriage or the swift movements of Saint-Loup—but to the sort of ubiquity which was so special to him. This military man with the ability to occupy so many different positions in space in such a short time disappeared down a side-street without seeing me, and I was left wondering whether it would be wise to enter a hotel whose modest appearance made me think that it could hardly have been Saint-Loup who had emerged. And yet I recalled involuntarily that he had—unjustly—been involved in a case of espionage because his name had been found in some letters captured on a German officer. He had, of course, been completely