NOWHERE else in the world in our time have any people learned to live so graciously in a city as the French lived in Paris. I was prepared to like this capital because I liked the Frenchmen I had known and also because I had once worn the uniform of the country with gratitude and pride, but these were sentimental reasons and they were inadequate preparation for the impact of Paris on my Slavic disposition.

When I arrived there in the spring of 1926, the Left Bank had already become the focus of bright young writing, but since I was unfamiliar with the bulk of modern literature—particularly of the Hemingway-Stein school—I was spared inevitable comparisons between my own reactions to the city and those of more articulate men. I felt as so many others have done in their turn, that no one else in the world could possibly appreciate Paris as I did, no one else love it so much. In talking about it, my conversation became as prodigal with adjectives as a parson’s Sunday sermon.

We took a small apartment in Auteuil behind the church in the Rue Corot. At first we behaved in the usual fashion of strangers in Paris: we visited famous shrines, ate in renowned restaurants, made pilgrimages to Malmaison and Versailles, took in all the churches and cemeteries and monuments, and thought we were the first to discover the delicate beauty of Sainte Chapelle. We had ourselves lifted up the monstrosity of an Eiffel Tower to drink benedictine at its top, went to the opera, patronized the best couturiers, and drank in Harry’s bar at the Ritz. All this excited Toni beyond her most vivid hopes and for awhile I was pleased to feel that I was the means of giving her this freedom. There was no pretense of more than amiable affection between us, but for the time being we both considered that enough.

After several weeks of sight-seeing I decided it was time to go back to work. I took a letter of introduction I had received from a director of Credit Lyonnais whom I had known in Prague and presented myself to the directors of the Grand Magazins du Printemps, one of the largest department stores in Paris. It was my expressed aim to study every department of the organization and I was given the utmost co-operation as an unpaid volunteer worker.

To begin with, they sent me to Clichy to an enormous building which housed the export department of the firm where colossal mail orders from the French colonies were handled. I learned to tabulate these orders as they arrived, watched them being filled, helped wrap packages, pushed great hand trucks loaded with mail sacks, and even assisted in weighing and distributing them to trains. My knowledge of the intricacies of such a business expanded rapidly enough to make me dizzy.

At first I was invited to spend my lunch hours with the officers of the firm in their private canteen, but after the second week I excused myself and asked permission to eat with the employees who had accepted me as a fellow. This may have seemed a strange aberration on my part, but the French are inclined to let others be as peculiar as they choose. So I took my bottle of red wine from the counter with the workers, ate my sardines and filet mignon with spinach, finished with roquefort or camembert cheese and a long loaf of white bread, and listened to the conversation around me.

I was utterly fascinated by the spirit of these ordinary, uneducated young men and girls. They possessed an innate finesse—a quality which I had come to accept as the ultimate in sophistication—unrivaled by any man or woman I had known in the night clubs of Prague. They were gay and witty and quick-tempered; their minds had an edge that delighted me. Their logic was flawless and their common sense served as a basis for every turn and twist of their agile minds. Having once met these people, I lost all interest in the aspect of Paris most familiar to tourists. I began to hunt out the true Frenchman, to learn how he lived and what made him as he was. And the more I knew of him, the more I admired him.

Toni took no share in my absorption. She thought she had married a confirmed night club addict, and when I now refused to patronize the night life of Paris because it bored me, she was both disappointed and annoyed. She was willful and imperious and I was stubborn, so we quarreled. In addition to the stake her father had given me, she received a separate allowance and she announced her intention of using it to amuse herself in her own way. She proceeded to do so, but we usually met for dinner in a small restaurant around the corner from the Rue Corot, called l’Auberge du Mouton Blanc.

I had formed an attachment for the Mouton Blanc because it was part of my new mood. Regular patrons were given their own napkin rings and a cubicle in a wall box beside the front door. Each evening as they came in they reached for their own napery on the way to their tables, and when they went out they put their napkins away for the next night. Here in the Mouton Blanc I began to understand the subtle art of the epicure. Radis roses were not radishes as I knew them in Prague, where small boys sold them in bunches from baskets in beer halls, but an hors d’oeuvre to be tested and tasted slowly with the same ceremony accorded to the sixty plates of hors d’oeuvres served at the huge Brasserie Universelle which Toni preferred. Vin rosé from a cold carafe cost a few centimes, but it could not be matched by all the French wine shipped out of the country in sealed bottles.

In every way that was a strange and illuminating year. The first time we went to a cinema I discovered the relief of being able to show my admiration or disapproval of the picture along with the rest of the audience, who shouted or booed or talked back at the actors in accordance with the quality of the film.

I learned the ultimate satisfaction of evenings spent on the Butte de Montmartre while I watched the lights of Paris come on. And then I would wander down again and cross the Seine to sit for hours in the Dôme and the Rotonde, listening and sometimes joining a strange group of Frenchmen while the sound of Paris soaked into me. Those were the days before Montparnasse had been taken over by American tourists.

On Tuesdays I walked along the Allée des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne to watch French society drive up in their handsome cars for the purpose of visiting one another in the back seats of their limousines while their uniformed chauffeurs sat on benches beside the walk and talked to each other, too. As likely as not their conversation was about their employers.

On Sundays I found my way to the guignol theater on the Champs-Élysées to watch well-behaved, serious and exceedingly handsome children with enormous eyes as they in turn watched the marionettes. Their sharply intelligent observations and incisive comments were a revelation to me. Children are not adults from the cradle in my country. I can still hear the sharp chatter of these amazing audiences at the guignol theater whenever I look into the brown beady eyes of Renoir’s otherwise pink and white infants.

By the end of the summer I was transferred to the main department store of Printemps on Boulevard Haussmann where I served as an interpreter. Whenever a call came for someone to help a Swede or a Pole or a German or anyone else who could speak Czech or German but no French, I conducted them through the entire house and attended to their sales. So I learned not only how to handle customers but also the quality of the French goods which they bought, from furniture to perfume to lingerie and toys.

Here I discovered the singular art of French clerks in showing and selling the products they handled. Behind their smiles lay a vibrating touch of laughter which displayed their pleasure in presenting a lovely piece of silk or a beautiful pottery bowl. Their senses invariably reacted to merchandise which they would never be able to buy for themselves, and it gave them more pleasure to handle it than the customer would ever know in owning it. These were simple workers, but they were neither little people nor common people, as modern parlance would have them called.

Now I spent my noon hours on the terrace of the Café Weber, shunning the Café de la Paix where no self-respecting Frenchman would allow himself to be seen. I could look in one direction to the Place de la Concord and up another to the Madeleine, and all the while I could listen to the symphony of voices around me. There was more noise from street traffic in Paris than I had ever known anywhere else in my life, but I had ears only for the music of the French language, its cadence so different from ours.

An old woman held out copies of L’Intransigeant and called her wares; midinettes from surrounding shops stopped at the next table long enough to eat their sandwiches and never stop chattering; men with heaven knows what occupations spun out their political arguments for hours; famous mannequins from the ateliers and couturiers of Rue Royale and Rue St. Honoré exchanged gossip over their apéritifs. And all the while I listened and listened, loving them all because they were Paris.

As I saw less and less of Toni I found myself turning inward for the pleasure of watching my own imagination and learning expand. Since she had no interest in joining me, it was a journey I would have to take alone, for I certainly had no intention of going back to a life I was through with forever. I began to buy quantities of books at Flammarion on the Boulevard des Italiens and an equal number from the stalls along the quais. They were exclusively French, for what else could I read while I sat on a bench in the Tuileries or near the Rond Point?

I came to know my way through the galleries and corridors of the Louvre blindfolded, and when I had absorbed as much as I could of the old masters, I found my way to the Luxembourg. Many of the paintings I learned to like without the help of shibboleths of culture, and much I disliked without knowing why. I can remember standing for hours, time after time, before the Mona Lisa, wondering why I could never see her as anything but a dull and dreary doll. I tried to make myself look at the painting as though I were the first man in the world to see it, fresh from Leonardo’s brush, but it escaped me and I never discovered what elusive quality had caught the attention of the ages to make it the most famous painting in that great collection. Certainly the fact that it had been stolen under dramatic circumstances in no way lessened its fame.

On the other hand, I knew very well why I was drawn back constantly to study and admire the Degas dancers, the Cézannes and Monets and Renoirs and even the white lights of the Utrillo street scenes. They were the Paris I had discovered, given back to me through the creative mind of Frenchmen who had known and loved it too. In a strange way I felt a kinship with these men, and feeling it, I was never lonely.

In the evenings I fell into the habit of walking under the heavy chestnut trees along the Champs-Élysées toward one of the loveliest sights in all the world—the burning sky of a sunset behind the Arc de Triomphe. After dark I would sit for hours on the terrace of the Café Fouquet, still listening and liking what I overheard.

Somerset Maugham, in The Summing Up, has said that “the unexpectedness, singularity and infinite variety of the ordinary afford unending material. The great man is too often all of a piece—having created a figure to protect himself from the world or to impress it. . . .” He refers to material for the writer, of course, but I couldn’t help remembering those Paris days when I later read this book, for so it was with me then. Unhampered by alcohol and lack of sleep for the first time in ten years, my mind was absorbing a wealth of material from the infinite variety of the ordinary. How or where I might one day use it I never thought.

It was on the terrace of the Café Fouquet one evening that I had a return of the old hallucination, thinking I had seen Rée Bertin several tables away. I sat and watched the girl’s profile as she turned her head quickly from one to another of the group she was with, and then as though she had felt my stare she looked over her shoulder in my direction, and our eyes met. It was one of those moments we all experience from time to time. A message passes between two pairs of eyes in a room filled with people who are unaware of the shared knowledge and secret understanding in it, like a wireless message that goes through material obstacles because to the radio wave they do not exist.

This time it was actually Rée. She rose and came toward me, holding out her hands and letting her face fill with the light of recognition. For a few moments she sat at my table and we talked about each other. She had just finished an engagement at the Folies-Bergère and was leaving Paris soon; I told her of my marriage. Then she returned to her friends, but in those few moments we both knew that our love for each other still lay deep and strong within us.

Had I known then that it would be twelve years before we met again I might not have let her go so easily. The next time I saw her it was in Warsaw, the same kind of stray encounter. By that time we could summon only a casual, friendly interest in each other. She was still a notable success in her dancing, and I was on a semi-diplomatic mission for my government. Where she is now I have no idea.