Fran was having her portrait painted, glossily and very expensively, by a Belgian whose manner of serving tea and commenting on new frocks had enabled him to capture a number of rich American women. With him, painting was a social function; while he worked he was surrounded by the most decorative human parrots and peacocks, shrieking their admiration of his craftsmanship, which was excellent. He managed to add the muzziness of a Laurencin to the photography of a Sargent; he made his women look rich, and all alike.
Madame de Pénable had insisted on Fran’s going to this good man, and when Sam learned that the De Pénable had also insisted on a number of other women benefiting by the Belgian’s gifts, he wondered if possibly the lively De Pénable might not have some interest in the business. But Fran was magnificently offended when he made the hint.
“It may interest you to know,” she raged, “that M. Saurier wanted to paint me for nothing, because he said I was the most perfect type of American beauty he had ever seen! But of course I couldn’t let him do that. Of course you wouldn’t have noticed that certain Europeans think I’m rather good-looking—”
“Don’t,” said Sam mildly, “be a damn fool, my darling.”
He went once to the orgy of her sittings; and he, the rock of ages in business crises, wanted to scream as he heard Madame de Pénable, and six women, who spoke all languages, except French, with a French accent, lilting that “le Maître” was at least a genius, and that he was particularly historic in the matter of “flesh tints.”
He did not go again.
He came to like the affabilities of Endicott Everett Atkins even less than the expensive sunset-hues of Madame de Pénable. The De Pénable was surrounded by gay people. “Not so bad,” Sam considered, “to have a cocktail with a pretty girl that tells you that you look like a cross between Sir Lancelot and Jack Dempsey.” But Mr. Atkins had not yet heard of cocktails. And Mr. Atkins held forth. He had been everywhere, and he could make everywhere sound uninteresting. He would look at you earnestly and demand to know whether you had made a pilgrimage to Viterbo to see the Etruscan remains, and he made it sound so nagging a duty that Sam vowed he would never let himself be caught near Viterbo; he was so severe about American music that he made Sam long for the jazz which he had always rather irritably detested.
Toward the seven deadly arts Sam had had the inarticulate reverence which an Irish policeman might have toward a shrine of the Virgin on his beat … that little light seen at three of a winter’s morning. They were to him romance, escape, and he was irritated when they were presented to him as a preacher presents the virtues of sobriety and chastity. He hadn’t the training to lose himself in Bach or Goethe; but in Chesterton, in Schubert, in a Corot, he had been able to forget motors and Alec Kynance, and always he had chuckled over the gay anarchy of Mencken. But with rising stubbornness he asserted that if he had to take the arts as something in which he must pass an examination, he would chuck them altogether and be content with poker.
As Fran had both a sitting and a fitting that afternoon (to Sam they seemed much the same, except that Fran’s costumer was more virile and less grasping than her portrait-painter) he had a whole afternoon off.
Secretly, a little guiltily, he reflected, “I’ve done Notre Dame right, with Fran. Now I think I’ll sneak off and see if I really like it! You can’t tell! I might! Even though old Atkins says I have to. … Hell! I wish I were back in Zenith!”
Solemnly, his Baedeker shamelessly in hand, Sam lumbered out of his taxi before Notre Dame, and quite as shamelessly slipped off across the river to a café facing the cathedral. There, quietly, without Fran’s quivers of appreciation, he began to feel at home.
He admitted the cathedral’s gray domination. There was strength there; strength and endurance and wisdom. The flying buttresses soared like wings. The whole cathedral expanded before his eyes; the work of human hands seemed to tower larger than the sky. He felt, dimly and disconnectedly, that he too had done things with his hands; that the motor car was no contemptible creation; that he was nearer to the forgotten, the anonymous and merry and vulgar artisans who had created this somber epic of stone, than was any Endicott Everett Atkins with his Adam’s apple ecclesiastically throbbing as he uttered pomposities about “the transition in Gothic motifs.” How those cheery artisans would have laughed—drinking their wine, perhaps, at this same corner!
He read in the Book of Words. (Did Ruskin and Cellini and Dante actually travel without Baedekers? How strange it seemed, and new!)
“Notre Dame … in early Roman times the site was occupied by a temple of Jupiter. The present church was begun in 1163.”
He laid the book down and drifted into the pleasantest dreaming he had known for all the fatal weeks since he had been adopted by the Right People.
A temple of Jupiter. Priests in white robes. Sacrificial bulls with patient wondering eyes, tossing their thick garlanded heads. Chariots pounding across the square—right across the river there! The past, which had been to the young Sam Dodsworth playing football, to the man harassed by building motor cars, only a flamboyant myth, was suddenly authentic, and he walked with Julius Caesar, who in that moment ceased to be merely a drawing in a schoolbook, a ventriloquist’s
