U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [91]
Oh if you want to see that statue of Libertee
Keep away from that battle of Paree
THE CAMERA EYE (35)
there were always two cats the color of hot milk with a little coffee in it with aquamarine eyes and sootblack faces in the window of the laundry opposite the little creamery where we ate breakfast on the Montagne St.
-215-Geneviève huddled between the old squeezedup slate-grey houses of the Latin Quarter leaning over steep smal streets cosy under the fog minute streets lit with dif-ferentcolored chalks cluttered with infinitesimal bars res-taurants paintshops and old prints beds bidets faded per-fumery microscopic sizzle of frying butter the Bertha made a snapping noise no louder than a
cannoncracker near the hotel where Oscar Wilde died we al ran up stairs to see if the house was on fire but the old woman whose lard was burning was sore as a crutch al the big new quarters near the Arc de Triomphe
were deserted but in the dogeared yel owbacked Paris of the Carmagnole the Faubourg St Antoine the Commune
we were singing
'suis dans l'axe
'suis dans l'axe
'suis dans l'axe du gros canon
when the Bertha dropped in the Seine there was a
concours de pêche in the little brightgreen skiffs among al the old whiskery fishermen scooping up in nets the minnows the concussion had stunned
EVELINE HUTCHINS
Eveline went to live with Eleanor in a fine apartment Eleanor had gotten hold of somehow on the quai de la
-216-Tournel e. It was the mansard floor of a grey peeling-faced house built at the time of Richelieu and done over under Louis Quinze. Eveline never tired of looking out the window, through the delicate tracing of the wroughtiron balcony, at the Seine where toy steamboats bucked the cur-rent, towing shinyvarnished barges that had lace curtains and geraniums in the windows of their deckhouses painted green and red, and at the island opposite where the rock-eting curves of the flying buttresses shoved the apse of Nôtre Dâme dizzily upwards out of the trees of a little park. They had tea at a smal Buhl table in the window almost every evening when they got home from the office on the Rue de Rivoli, after spending the day pasting pic-tures of ruined French farms and orphaned children and starving warbabies into scrapbooks to be sent home for use in Red Cross drives.
After tea she'd go out in the kitchen and watch Yvonne cook. With the groceries and sugar they drew at the Red Cross commissary, Yvonne operated a system of barter so that their food hardly cost them anything. At first Eveline tried to stop her but she'd answer with a torrent of argu-ment: did Mademoisel e think that President Poincaré or the generals or the cabinet ministers, ces salots de prof-iteurs, ces salots d'embusqués, went without their brioches?
It was the systeme D, ils s'en fichent des particuliers, des pauvres gens . . . very wel her ladies would eat as wel as any old camels of generals, if she had her way she'd have al the generals line up before a firingsquad and the embusqué ministers and the ronds de cuir too. Eleanor said her sufferings had made the old woman a little cracked but Jerry Burnham said it was the rest of the world that was cracked.
Jerry Burnham was the little redfaced man who'd been such a help with the colonel the first night Eveline got to Paris. They often laughed about it afterwards. He was working for the U.P. and appeared every few days in her
-217-office on his rounds covering Red Cross activities. He knew al the Paris restaurants and would take Eveline out to dinner at the Tour d'Argent or to lunch at the Taverne Nicholas Flamel and they'd walk around the old streets of the Marais afternoons and get late to their work together. When they'd settle in the evening at a good quiet table in a café where they couldn't be overheard (al the waiters were spies he said), he'd