IT was along the close of summer when Fillmore invited me to come and live with him.  He had a studio apartment overlooking the cavalry barracks just off the Place Dupleix.  We had seen a lot of each other since the little trip to Le Havre.  If it hadn't been for Fillmore I didn't know where I should be today - dead, likely.

      "I would have asked you long before," he said, "if it hadn't been for that little bitch Jackie.  I didn't know how to get her off my hands."

      I had to smile.  It was always like that with Fillmore.  He had a genius for attracting homeless bitches.  Anyway, Jackie had finally cleared out of her own accord.

      The rainy season was coming on, the long, dreary stretch of grease and fog and squirts of rain that make you damp and miserable.  An execrable place in the winter, Paris!  A climate that eats into your soul, that leaves you bare as the Labrador coast.  I noticed with some anxiety that the only means of heating the place was the little stove in the studio.  However, it was still comfortable.  And the view from the studio window was superb.

      In the morning Fillmore would shake me roughly and leave a ten franc note on the pillow.  As soon as he had gone I would settle back for a final snooze.  Sometimes I would lie abed till noon.  There was nothing pressing, except to finish the book, and that didn't worry me much because I was already convinced that nobody would accept it anyway.  Nevertheless, Fillmore was much impressed by it.  When he arrived in the evening with a bottle under his arm the first thing he did was to go to the table and see how many pages I had knocked off.  At first I enjoyed this show of enthusiasm but later, when I was running dry, it made me devilishly uneasy to see him poking around, searching for the pages that were supposed to trickle out of me like water from a tap.  When there was nothing to show I felt exactly like some bitch whom he had harboured.  He used to say about Jackie, I remembered - "it would have been all right if only she had slipped me a piece of ass once in a while."  If I had been a woman I would have been only too glad to slip him a piece of ass: it would have been much easier than to feed him the pages which he expected.

      Nevertheless, he tried to make me feel at ease.  There was always plenty of food and wine, and now and then he would insist that I accompany him to a dancing.  He was fond of going to a nigger joint on the Rue d'Odessa where there was a good-looking mulatto who used to come home with him occasionally.  The one thing that bothered him was that he couldn't find a French girl who liked to drink.  They were all too sober to satisfy him - He liked to bring a woman back to the studio and guzzle it with her before getting down to business.  He also liked to have her think that he was an artist.  As the man from whom he had rented the place was a painter, it was not difficult to create an impression; the canvases which we had found in the armoire were soon stuck about the place and one of the unfinished ones conspicuously mounted on the easel.  Unfortunately they were all of a surrealistic quality and the impression they created was usually unfavourable.  Between a whore, a concierge and a cabinet minister there is not much difference in taste where pictures are concerned.  It was a matter of great relief to Fillmore when Mark Swift began to visit us regularly with the intention of doing my portrait.  Fillmore had a great admiration for Swift.  He was a genius, he said.  And though there was something ferocious about everything he tackled, nevertheless when he painted a man or an object you could recognize it for what it was.

      At Swift's request I had begun to grow a beard.  The shape of my skull, he said, required a beard.  I had to sit by the window with the Eiffel Tower in the picture too.  He also wanted the typewriter in the picture.  Kruger got the habit of dropping in too about this time; he maintained that Swift knew nothing about painting.  It exasperated him to see things out of proportion.  He believed in Nature's laws, implicitly.  Swift didn't give a fuck about Nature; he wanted to paint what was inside his head.  Anyway, there was Swift's portrait of me stuck on the easel now, and though everything was out of proportion, even a cabinet minister could see that it was a human head, a man with a beard.  The concierge, indeed, began to take a great interest in the picture; she thought the likeness was striking.  And she liked the idea of showing the Eiffel Tower in the background.

      Things rolled along this way peacefully for about a month or more.  The neighbourhood appealed to me, particularly at night when the full squalor and lugubriousness of it made itself felt.  The little Place, so charming and tranquil at twilight, could assume the most dismal, sinister character when darkness came on.  There was that long, high wall covering one side of the barracks against which there was always a couple embracing each other furtively - often in the rain.  A depressing sight to see two lovers squeezed against a prison wall under a gloomy street light: as if they had been driven right to the last bounds.  What went on inside the enclosure was also depressing.  On a rainy day I used to stand by the window and look down on the activity below, quite as though it were something going on on another planet.  It seemed incomprehensible to me.  Everything done according to schedule, but a schedule that must had been devised by a lunatic.  There they were, floundering around in the mud, the bugles blowing, the horses charging - all within four walls.  A sham battle.  A lot of tin soldiers who hadn't the least interest in learning how to kill or how to polish their boots or currycomb the horses.  Utterly ridiculous the whole thing, but part of the scheme of things.  When they had nothing to do they looked even more ridiculous; they scratched themselves, they walked about with their hands in their pockets, they looked up at the sky.  And when an officer came along they clicked their heels and saluted.  A madhouse, it seemed to me.  Even the horses looked silly.  And then sometimes the artillery was dragged out and they went clattering down the street on parade and people stood and gaped and admired the fine uniforms.  To me they always looked like an army corps in retreat; something shabby, bedraggled, crestfallen about them, their uniforms too big for their bodies, all the alertness, which as individuals they possess to such a remarkable degree, gone now.

      When the sun came out, however, things looked different.  There was a ray of hope in their eyes, they walked more elastically, they showed a little enthusiasm.  Then the colour of things peeped out graciously and there was that fuss and bustle so characteristic of the French; at the bistro on the corner they chattered gaily over their drinks and the officers seemed more human, more French, I might say.  When the sun comes out, any spot in Paris can look beautiful; and if there is a bistro with an awning rolled down, a few tables on the sidewalk and coloured drinks in the glasses, then people look altogether human.  And they are human - the finest people in the world when the sun shines!  So intelligent, so indolent, so carefree!  It's a crime to herd such a people into barracks, to put them through exercises, to grade them into privates and sergeants and colonels and what not.

      As I say, things were rolling along smoothly.  Now and then Carol came along with a job for me, travel articles which he hated to do himself.  They only paid fifty francs a piece, but they were easy to do because I had only to consult the back issues and revamp the old articles.  People only read these things when they were sitting on a toilet or killing time in a waiting room.  The principal thing was to keep the adjectives well furbished - the rest was a matter of dates and statistics.  If it was an important article the head of the department signed it himself; he was a half-wit who couldn't speak any language well, but who knew how to find fault.  If he found a paragraph that seemed to him well written he would say - "Now that's the way I want you to write!  That's beautiful.  You have my permission to use it in your book."  These beautiful paragraphs we sometimes lifted from an encyclopaedia or an old guide book.  Some of them Carl did put into his book - they had a surrealistic character.

      Then one evening, after I had been out for a walk, I open the door and a woman springs out of the bedroom.  "So you're the writer!" she exclaims at once, and she looks at my beard as if to corroborate her impression.  "What a horrid beard!" she says.  "I think you people must be crazy around here."  Fillmore is trailing after her with a blanket in his hand.  "She's a princess," he says, smacking his lips as if he had just tasted some rare caviar.  The two of them were dressed for the street; I couldn't understand what they were doing with the bedclothes.  And then it occurred to me immediately that Fillmore must have dragged her into the bedroom to show her his laundry bag.  He always did that with a new woman, especially if she was a Francaise.  "No tickee, no shirtee!" that's what was stitched on the laundry bag, and somehow Fillmore had an obsession for explaining this motto to every female who arrived.  But this dame was not a Francaise - he made that clear to me at once.  She was Russian - and a princess, no less.

      He was bubbling over with excitement, like a child that has just found a new toy.  "She speaks five languages!" he said, obviously overwhelmed by such an accomplishment.

      "Non, four!" she corrected promptly.

      "Well, four then.... Anyway, she's a damned intelligent girl.  You ought to hear her speak."

      The princess was nervous - she kept scratching her thigh and rubbing her nose.  "Why does he want to make his bed now?" she asked me abruptly.  "Does he think he will get me that way?  He's a big child.  He behaves disgracefully.  I took him to a Russian restaurant and he danced like a nigger."  She wriggled her bottom to illustrate.  "And he talks too much.  Too loud.  He talks nonsense."  She swished about the room, examining the paintings and the books, keeping her chin well up all the time but scratching herself intermittently.  Now and then she wheeled around like a battleship and delivered a broadside.  Fillmore kept following her about with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other.  "Stop following me like that!" she exclaimed.  "And haven't you anything to drink but this?  Can't you get a bottle of champagne?  I must have some champagne.  My nerves!  My nerves!"

      Fillmore tries to whisper a few words in my ear.  "An actress ... a movie star ... some guy jilted her and she can't get over it.... I'm going to get her cockeyed...."

      "I'll clear out then," I was saying, when the princess interrupted us with a shout.  "Why do you whisper like that?" she cried, stamping her foot.  "Don't you know that's not polite?  And you, I thought you were going to take me out?  I must get drunk tonight, I have told you that already."

      "Yes, yes," said Fillmore, "we're going in a minute.  I just want another drink."

      "You're a pig!" she yelled.  "But you're a nice boy too.  Only you're loud.  You have no manners."  She turned to me.  "Can I trust him to behave himself?  I must get drunk tonight but I don't want him to disgrace me.  Maybe I will come back here afterwards.  I would like to talk to you.  You seem more intelligent."

      As they were leaving the princess shook my hand cordially and promised to come for dinner some evening - "when I will be sober," she said.

      "Fine!" I said.  "Bring another princess along - or a countess, at least.  We change the sheets every Saturday."

 

      About three in the morning Fillmore staggers in ... alone.  Lit up like an ocean liner, and making a noise like a blind man with his cracked cane.  Tap, tap, tap, down the weary lane.... "Going straight to bed," he says, as he marches past me.  "Tell you all about it tomorrow."  He goes inside to his room and throws back the covers.  I hear him groaning - "what a woman! what a woman!"  In a second he's out again, with his hat on and the cracked cane in his hand.  "I knew something like that was going to happen.  She's crazy!"

      He rummages around in the kitchen a while and then comes back to the studio with a bottle of Anjou.  I have to sit up and down a glass with him.

      As far as I can piece the story together the whole thing started at the Rond-Point des Champs Elysées where he had dropped off for a drink on his way home.  As usual at that hour the terrasse was crowded with buzzards.  This one was sitting right on the aisle with a pile of saucers in front of her; she was getting drunk quietly all by herself when Fillmore happened along and caught her eye.  "I'm drunk," she giggled, "won't you sit down?"  And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do, she began right off the bat with the yarn about her movie director, how he had given her the go-by and how she had thrown herself in the Seine and so forth and so on.  She couldn't remember anymore which bridge it was, only that there was a crowd around when they fished her out of the water.  Besides, she didn't see what difference it made which bridge she threw herself from - why did he ask such questions?  She was laughing hysterically about it, and then suddenly she had a desire to be off - she wanted to dance.  Seeing him hesitate she opens her bag impulsively and pulls out a hundred franc note.  The next moment, however, she decided that a hundred francs wouldn't go very far.  "Haven't you any money at all?" she said.  No, he hadn't very much in his pocket, but he had a chequebook at home.  So they made a dash for the chequebook and then, of course, I had to happen in just as he was explaining to her the "No tickee, no shirtee" business.

      On the way home they had stopped off at the Poison d'Or for a little snack which she had washed down with a few vodkas.  She was in her element there with everyone kissing her hand and murmuring Princesse, Princesse.  Drunk as she was, she managed to collect her dignity.  "Don't wiggle your behind like that!" she kept saying, as they danced.

      It was Fillmore's idea, when he brought her back to the studio, to stay there.  But, since she was such an intelligent girl and so erratic, he had decided to put up with her whims and postpone the grand event.  He had even visualized the prospect of running across another princess and bringing the two of them back.  When they started out for the evening, therefore, he was in a good humour and prepared, if necessary, to spend a few hundred francs on her.  After all, one doesn't run across a princess every day.

      This time she dragged him to another place, a place where she was still better known and where there would be no trouble in cashing a cheque, as she said.  Everybody was in evening clothes and there was more spine-breaking, hand-kissing nonsense as the waiter escorted them to a table.

      In the middle of a dance she suddenly walks off the floor, with tears in her eyes.  "What's the matter?" he said, "what did I do this time?"  And instinctively he put his hand to his backside, as though perhaps it might still be wiggling.  "It's nothing," she said.  "You didn't do anything.  Come, you're a nice boy," and with that she drags him on to the floor again and begins to dance with abandon.  "But what's the matter with you?" he murmured.  "It's nothing," she repeated.  "I saw somebody, that's all."  And then, with a sudden spurt of anger - "why do you get me drunk?  Don't you know it makes me crazy?

      "Have you got a cheque?" she says.  "We must get out of here."  She called the waiter over and whispered to him in Russian.  "Is it a good cheque?" she asked, when the waiter had disappeared.  And then, impulsively: "Wait for me downstairs in the cloakroom.  I must telephone somebody."

      After the waiter had brought the change Fillmore sauntered leisurely downstairs to the cloakroom to wait for her.  He strode up and down, humming and whistling softly, and smacking his lips in anticipation of the caviar to come.  Five minutes passed.  Ten minutes.  Still whistling softly.  When twenty minutes had gone by and still no princess he at last grew suspicious.  The cloakroom attendant said that she had left long ago.  He dashed outside.  There was a nigger in livery standing there with a big grin on his face.  Did the nigger know where she had breezed to?  Nigger grins.  Nigger says: "Ah heerd Coupole, dassall sir!"

      At the Coupole, downstairs, he finds her sitting in front of a cocktail with a dreamy, trancelike expression on her face. She smiles when she sees him.

      "Was that a decent thing to do," he says, "to run away like that?  You might have told me that you didn't like me...."

      She flared up at this, got theatrical about it.  And after a lot of gushing she commenced to whine and slobber.  "I'm crazy," she blubbered.  "And you're crazy too.  You want me to sleep with you, and I don't want to sleep with you."  And then she began to rave about her lover, the movie director whom she had seen on the dance floor.  That's why she had to run away from the place.  That's why she took drugs and got drunk every night.  That's why she threw herself in the Seine.  She babbled on this way about how crazy she was and then suddenly she had an idea. "Let's go to Bricktop's!"  There was a man there whom she knew ... he had promised her a job once.  She was certain he would help her.

      "What's it going to cost?" asked Fillmore cautiously.

      It would cost a lot, she let him know that immediately. "But listen, if you take me to Bricktop's, I promise to go home with you."  She was honest enough to add that it might cost him five or six hundred francs.  "But I'm worth it!  You don't know what a woman I am.  There isn't another woman like me in all Paris...."

      "That's what you think!"  His Yankee blood was coming to the fore.  "But I don't see it.  I don't see that you're worth anything.  You're just a poor crazy son-of-a-bitch.  Frankly, I'd rather give fifty francs to some poor French girl; at least they give you something in return."

      She hit the ceiling when he mentioned the French girls.  "Don't talk to me about those women!  I hate them!  They're stupid ... they're ugly ... they're mercenary.  Stop it, I tell you!"

      In a moment she had subsided again.  She was on a new tack.  "Darling," she murmured, "you don't know what I look like when I'm undressed.  I'm beautiful!"  And she held her breasts with her two hands.

      But Fillmore remained unimpressed.  "You're a bitch!" he said coldly.  "I wouldn't mind spending a few hundred francs on you, but you're crazy.  You haven't even washed your face.  Your breath stinks.  I don't give a damn whether you're a princess or not ... I don't want any of your high-assed Russian variety.  You ought to get out in the street and hustle for it.  You're no better than any little French girl.  You're not as good.  I wouldn't piss away another sou on you.  You ought to go to America - that's the place for a bloodsucking leech like you...."

      She didn't seem to be at all put out by this speech.  "I think you're just a little afraid of me," she said.

      "Afraid of you?  Of you?"

      "You're just a little boy," she said.  "You have no manners.  When you know me better you will talk differently.... Why don't you try to be nice?  If you don't want to go with me tonight, very well.  I will be at the Rond-Point tomorrow between five and seven.  I like you."

      "I don't intend to be at the Rond-Point tomorrow, or any other night!  I don't want to see you again ... ever.  I'm through with you.  I'm going out to find myself a nice little French girl.  You can go to hell!"

      She looked at him and smiled wearily. "That's what you say now.  But wait!  Wait until you've slept with me.  You don't know yet what a beautiful body I have.  You think the French girls know how to make love ... wait!  I will make you crazy about me.  I like you.  Only you're uncivilized.  You're just a boy.  You talk too much...."

      "You're crazy," said Fillmore.  "I wouldn't fall for you if you were the last woman on earth.  Go home and wash your face."  He walked off without paying for the drinks.

      In a few days, however, the princess was installed.  She's a genuine princess, of that we're pretty certain.  But she has the clap.  Anyway, life is far from dull here.  Fillmore has bronchitis, the princess, as I was saying, has the clap, and I have the piles.  Just exchanged six empty bottles at the Russian epicerie across the way.  Not a drop went down my gullet.  No meat, no wine, no rich game, no women.  Only fruit and paraffin oil, arnica drops and adrenalin ointment.  And not a chair in the joint that's comfortable enough.  Right now, looking at the princess, I'm propped up like a pasha.  Pasha!  That reminds me of her name: Macha.  Doesn't sound so damned aristocratic to me.  Reminds me of The Living Corpse.

      At first I thought it was going to be embarrassing, a menage à tois, but not at all.  I thought when I saw her move in that it was all up with me again, that I should have to find another place, but Fillmore soon gave me to understand that he was only putting her up until she got on her feet.  With a woman like her I don't know what an expression like that means; as far as I can see she's been standing on her head all her life.  She says the revolution drove her out of Russia, but I'm sure if it hadn't been the revolution it would have been something else.  She's under the impression that she's a great actress, we never contradict her in anything she says because it's time wasted.  Fillmore finds her amusing.  When he leaves for the office in the morning he drops ten francs on her pillow and ten francs on mine; at night the three of us go to the Russian restaurant down below.  The neighbourhood is full of Russians and Macha has already found a place where she can run up a little credit.  Naturally, ten francs a day isn't anything for a princess; she wants caviar now and then and champagne, and she needs a complete new wardrobe in order to get a job in the movies again.  She has nothing to do now except to kill time.  She's putting on fat.

      This morning I had quite a fright.  After I had washed my face I grabbed her towel by mistake.  We can't seem to train her to put her towel on the right hook.  And when I bawled her out for it she answered smoothly: "My dear, if one can become blind from that I would have been blind years ago."

      And then there's the toilet, which we all have to use.  I try speaking to her in a fatherly way about the toilet seat. "Oh, zut!" she says.  "If you are so afraid I'll go to a café."  But it's not necessary to do that, I explain.  Just use ordinary precautions.  "Tut tut!" she says, "I won't sit there then ... I'll stand up."

      Everything is cockeyed with her around.  First she wouldn't come across because she had the monthlies.  For eight days that lasted.  We were beginning to think she was faking it.  But no, she wasn't faking.  One day, when I was trying to put the place in order, I found some cotton batting under the bed and it was stained with blood.  With her, everything goes under the bed: orange peel, wadding, corks, empty bottles, scissors, used condoms, books, pillows.... She makes the bed only when it's time to retire.  Most of the time she lies abed reading her Russian papers.  "My dear," she says to me, "if it weren't for my papers I wouldn't get out of bed at all."  That's it precisely!  Nothing but Russian newspapers.  Not a scratch of toilet paper around - nothing but Russian newspapers with which to wipe your ass.

      Anyway, speaking of her idiosyncrasies, after the menstrual flow was over, after she had rested properly and put a nice layer of fat around her belt, still she wouldn't come across.  Pretended that she only liked women.  To take on a man she had to first be properly stimulated.  Wanted us to take her to a bawdy house where they put on the dog and man act.  Or better still, she said, would be Leda and the swan: the flapping of the wings excited her terribly.

      One night, to test her out, was accompanied her to a place that she suggested.  But before we had a chance to broach the subject to the madam, a drunken Englishman, who was sitting at the next table, fell into a conversation with us.  He had already been upstairs twice but he wanted another try at it.  He had only about twenty francs in his pocket, and not knowing any French he asked us if we would help him to bargain with the girl he had his eyes on.  Happened she was a Negress, a powerful wench from Martinique, and beautiful as a panther.  Had a lovely disposition too.  In order to persuade her to accept the Englishman's remaining sous, Fillmore had to promise to go with her himself soon as she got through with the Englishman.  The princess looked on, heard everything that was said, and then got on her high horse.  She was insulted.  "Well," said Fillmore, "you wanted some excitement - you can watch me do it!"  She didn't want to watch him - she wanted to watch a drake.  "Well, by Jesus," he said, "I'm as good as a drake any day ... maybe a little better."  Like that, one word led to another, and finally the only way we could appease her was to call one of the girls back and let them tickle each other.... When Fillmore came back with the Negress her eyes were smouldering.  I could see from the way Fillmore looked at her that she must have given an unusual performance and I began to feel lecherous myself.  Fillmore must have sensed how I felt, and what an ordeal it was to sit and look on all night, for suddenly he pulled a hundred franc note out of his pocket and, slapping it in front of me, he said: "Look here, you probably need a lay more than any of us.  Take that a pick someone out for yourself."  Somehow that gesture endeared him more to me than anything he had ever done for me, and he had done considerable.  I accepted the money in the spirit it was given and promptly signalled to the Negress to get ready for another lay.  That enraged the princess more than anything, it appeared.  She wanted to know if there wasn't anyone in the place good enough for us except this Negress.  I told her bluntly NO.  And it was so - the Negress was the queen of the harem.  You had only to look at her to get an erection.  Her eyes seemed to be swimming in sperm.  She was drunk with all the demands made upon her.  She couldn't walk straight anymore - at least it seemed that way to me.  Going up the narrow winding stairs behind her I couldn't resist the temptation to slide my hand up her crotch; we continued up the stairs that way, she looking back at me with a cheerful smile and wiggling her ass a bit when it tickled her too much.

      It was a good session all around.  Everyone was happy.  Macha seemed to be in a good mood too.  And so the next evening, after she had had her ration of champagne and caviar, after she had given us another chapter out of the history of her life, Fillmore went to work on her.  It seemed as though he was going to get his reward at last.  She had ceased to put up a fight anymore.  She lay back with her legs apart and she let him fool around and fool around and then, just as he was climbing over her, just as he was going to slip it in, she informs him nonchalantly that she has a dose of clap.  He rolled off her like a log.  I heard him fumbling around in the kitchen for the black soap he used on special occasions, and in a few moments he was standing by my bed with a towel in his hands and saying - "can you beat that? that son-of-a-bitch of a princess has the clap!"  He seemed pretty well scared about it.  The princess meanwhile was munching an apple and calling for her Russian newspapers.  It was quite a joke to her.  "There are worse things than that," she said, lying there in her bed and talking to us through the open door.  Finally, Fillmore began to see it as a joke too and, opening another bottle of Anjou, he poured out a drink for himself and quaffed it down.  It was only about one in the morning and so he sat there talking to me for a while.  He wasn't going to be put off by a thing like that, he told me.  Of course, he had to be careful ... there was the old dose which had come on in Le Havre.  He couldn't remember anymore how that happened.  Sometimes when he got drunk he forgot to wash himself.  It wasn't anything very terrible, but you never knew what might develop later.  He didn't want anyone massaging his prostate gland.  No, that he didn't relish.  The first dose he ever got was at college.  Didn't know whether the girl had given it to him or he to the girl; there was so much funny work going on about the campus you didn't know whom to believe.  Nearly all the co-eds had been knocked up some time or other.  Too damned ignorant ... even the profs were ignorant.  One of the profs had himself castrated, so the rumour went....

      Anyway, the next night he decided to risk it - with a condom.  Not much risk in that, unless it breaks.  He had brought himself some of the long fishskin variety - they were the most reliable, he assured me.  But then, that didn't work either.  She was too tight.  "Jesus, there's nothing abnormal about me," he said.  "How do you make that out?  Somebody got inside her all right to give her that dose.  He must have been abnormally small."

      So, one thing after another failing, he just gave it up altogether.  They lie there now like brother and sister, with incestuous dreams.  Says Macha, in her philosophic way: "In Russia it often happens that a man sleeps with a woman without touching her.  They can go on that way for weeks and weeks and never think anything about it.  Until paff! once he touches her ... paff! paff!  After that it's paff, paff, paff!"

 

      All efforts are concentrated now on getting Macha into shape.  Fillmore thinks if he cures her of the clap she may loosen up.  A strange idea.  So he's bought her a douche bag, a stock of permanganate, a whirling syringe and other little things which were recommended to him by a Hungarian doctor, a little quack of an abortionist over near the Place d'Aligre.  It seems his boss had knocked up a sixteen-year-old girl once and she had introduced him to the Hungarian; and then after that the boss had a beautiful chancre and it was the Hungarian again.  That's how one gets acquainted in Paris - genito-urinary friendships.  Anyway, under our strict supervision, Macha is taking care of herself.  The other night, though, we were in a quandary for a while.  She stuck the suppository inside her and then she couldn't find the string attached to it.  "My God!" she was yelling, "where is that string?  My God!  I can't find the string!"

      "Did you look under the bed?" said Fillmore.

      Finally she quieted down.  But only for a few minutes.  The next thing was: "My God! I'm bleeding again.  I just had my period and now there are gouttes again.   It must be that cheap champagne you buy.  My God, do you want me to bleed to death?"  She comes out with a kimono on and a towel stuck between her legs, trying to look dignified as usual.  "My whole life is just like that," she says.  "I'm a neurasthenic.  The whole day running around and at night I'm drunk again.  When I came to Paris I was still an innocent girl.  I read only Villon and Baudelaire.  But as I had then 300,000 Swiss francs in the bank I was crazy to enjoy myself, because in Russia they were always strict with me.  And as I was even more beautiful then than I am now, I had all the men falling at my feet."  Here she hitched up the slack which had accumulated around her belt.  "You mustn't think I had a stomach like that when I came here ... that's from all the poison I was given to drink ... those horrible aperitifs which the French are so crazy to drink.... So then I met my movie director and he wanted that I should play a part for him.  He said I was the most gorgeous creature in the world and he was begging me to sleep with him every night.  I was a foolish young virgin and so I permitted him to rape me one night.  I wanted to be a great actress and I didn't know he was full of poison.  So he gave me the clap ... and now I want that he should have it back again.  It's his fault that I committed suicide in the Seine.... Why are you laughing? Don't you believe that I committed suicide?  I can show you the newspapers ... there is my picture in all the papers.  I will show you the Russian papers some day ... they wrote about me wonderfully.... But, darling, you know that first I must have a new dress.  I can't vamp this man with these dirty rags I am in.  Besides, I still owe my dressmaker 12,000 francs...."

      From here on it's a long story about the inheritance which she is trying to collect.  She has a young lawyer, a Frenchman, who is rather timid, it seems, and he is trying to win back her fortune.  From time to time he used to give her a hundred francs or so on account.  "He's stingy, like all the French people," she says.  "And I was so beautiful, too, that he couldn't keep his eyes off me.  He kept begging me always to fuck him.  I got so sick and tired of listening to him that one night I said yes, just to keep him quiet, and so as I wouldn't lose my hundred francs now and then."  She paused a moment to laugh hysterically.  "My dear," she continued, "it was too funny for words what happened to him.  He calls me up on the phone one day and he says: 'I must see you right away ... it's very important.'  And when I see him he shows me a paper from the doctor - and it's gonorrhoea!  My dear, I laughed in his face.  How should I know that I still had the clap?  'You wanted to fuck me and so I fucked you!'  That made him quiet.  That's how it goes in life ... you don't suspect anything, and then all of a sudden paff, paff, paff!  He was such a fool that he fell in love with me all over again.  Only he begged me to behave myself and not run around Montparnasse all night drinking and fucking.  He said I was driving him crazy.  He wanted to marry me and then his family heard about me and they persuaded him to go to Indo-China...."

      From this Macha calmly switches to an affair she had with a Lesbian.  "It was very funny, my dear, how she picked me up one night.  I was at the 'Fetiche' and I was drunk as usual.  She took me from one place to the other and she made love to me under the table all night until I couldn't stand it anymore.  Then she took me to her apartment and for two hundred francs I let her suck me off.  She wanted me to live with her but I didn't want to have her suck me off every night ... it makes you too weak.  Besides, I can tell you that I don't care so much for Lesbians as I used to.  I would rather sleep with a man even though it hurts me.  When I get terribly excited I can't hold myself back anymore ... three, four, five times ... just like that!  Paff, paff, paff!  And then I bleed and that is very unhealthy for me because I am inclined to be anaemic.  So you see why once in a while I must let myself be sucked by a Lesbian...."