TOWARD the end of our projected year in Paris, Toni’s father wrote that we were expected home. Without consulting us he had canceled all arrangements for building our country house because he wanted us to live with the family, and quite candidly he added that he felt we had become too independent in Paris and needed a check on our actions when we returned. A suite of rooms in the town apartment and another in their country house had been set aside for us, but we would have our meals with the family. Toni had no more wish to return to Prague under such conditions than I did. We let the summons go unanswered.

On the heels of the first letter Papa Wiesner sent instructions for several transactions which he wanted me to handle for him before I left Paris. They were of a questionable nature and I promptly wrote to tell him I would have nothing to do with them. He replied that I was a donkey and added that every business firm like his took advantage of such loopholes in the law if the men behind the concerns were really smart. How else would he have managed to get where he was now?

I refused to discuss the matter further and told him so by return post. I added that I intended to stay in Paris without further financial assistance from him, because I could not undertake now to work in the kind of organizations he represented. Toni could do as she liked about returning to Prague without me. I realized with a shock after the letter had gone what a long way I had fallen from my position in the bank.

As soon as Papa Wiesner received my resignation from his interests he got on a train and came to Paris, bringing Mama Wiesner with him. There were scenes and tears and recriminations in which I refused to take part. Mama began packing Toni’s clothes as Papa insisted she go straight back with them, and Toni unpacked as fast as her mother took the gowns from their hangers. Her reasons for wanting to remain in Paris were obviously different from mine, but we were equally determined.

So the Wiesners went home and we moved to a smaller apartment on Rue des Longchamps, overlooking the Bois and the Château de Madrid. All Toni had asked of me was to take her away from her home and her parents, but in her heart she had counted on more. Having made a bargain, she refused to stand by it. She was possessed with a childish desire for sin, as though it were a commodity to be bought and hung around one’s neck like jewels. Perhaps she felt that by breaking the codes of behavior taught by her parents in their outwardly bourgeois conventionality, she would be able to throw off the memory of her life with them.

Unfortunately, however, she had no flair for the spectacular or even the small pecado because she was devoid of finesse. There was little point in trying to discuss our divergence of views because she always burst into tears at the least indication of not being able to have her own way. I have no doubt that in her own limited fashion she had reason to feel cheated. Nevertheless, it was impossible for me to treat her as though she were an entertainer, which appeared to be her desire, and she made no attempt to fit into the role of a wife. She made friends whom I never met and a few whom I did meet most unwillingly. Yet I found it impossible to blame her. Whatever my pride suffered at her hands was due me, for the mistake had been mine in believing we could turn marriage into a business arrangement and make it succeed.

Somehow the next two years dragged on. I went no further down and I did not move up. It was another of the plateaus in my life similar to the one in Slovakia during the two years following the end of the war, when we paced Horthy’s men on the other side of the stream that formed our mutual boundary. Faced with the necessity of supporting a wife as well as myself, I found a job at the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits which had shortly before amalgamated with Thos. Cook and Son. I waited on tourists behind the train accommodation counter and received for my services the sum of eight hundred francs a month.

The first day on this job I refused the generous tips offered by customers, but the other clerks made it clear that I must take the tips or leave. They depended on this income to supplement their small salaries and they had no intention of being deprived of it by my foolish example.

There is no sense in pretending it was a fine job or that I was doing any more than earning a living in a depressing manner. I was ashamed of the work because it was using so little of my experience and ability. At night I took home tourist folders and analyzed the material put out by every country in Europe to attract paying guests. I built up a study on the basis of style, illustrations, make-up, advertisements in these folders and sent it to the Czechoslovakian Minister of Transport as a suggestion for changing the old-fashioned and inefficient folders put out by my own country. I received no response from Prague, but the manager of Wagons-Lits, to whom I had also given a copy of my report, introduced a separate desk for information on Czechoslovakia and put me in charge of it. The pay was slightly higher, but not much.

It was useless to try to tell myself that this was a career for me or that I could ever be remotely satisfied with it. I was in a strange sort of stupor during these days, irritated by Toni on the one hand while I maintained a code of politeness in her presence, and on the other hand lulled by the charm Paris still held for me. I had failed completely in my banking career and I was ashamed to return to Prague as a member of a wealthy family with which I wanted nothing more to do. Had I accepted the post in the provinces offered by the bank, I would long ago have been called back and would by now have been on my way to a possible seat at the directors’ table. The time would come soon when I must salvage my self-respect, but I continued to hold the day off as long as I could this side of a breakdown.

One early winter afternoon when mists from the Seine were blurring the gray outlines of Notre Dame, I heard someone speak in Czech as I stood thumbing over books at a stall on the Quai des Grands Augustins. I turned to look at the speaker and found Karel Berounský waiting for me to recognize him. Had I seen him before he spoke I would have tried to get away, but there he was, with no mark of censure in his eyes. It was good to hear Czech again, to see a familiar face from boyhood and from the bank. We wandered on to the Boulevard St. Michel to find a place to eat together, and halfway through the night we were still talking.

In every respect but one we were opposites. He was exceptionally tall for a Czech, strikingly handsome with black hair and strong, sharp features. He had a way of raising his hair on his forehead to indicate incredulity, but he kept the rest of his face muscles rigid. He was dangerously clever, with an ability to see through every human pretense and small sham down to the rock bottom of reality. Here in Paris for the first time on a short holiday he found that he hated every aspect of it, and he was entirely willing to let his condemnation include the whole French nation. Nothing I could say moved him; it was a disagreement between us that lasted in one form or another for the next ten years.

He considered me foolishly sentimental in my love for Paris because he could see the French only as moneygrubbing cynics without charm. He conceded their logic, but added that life could never be compressed into mathematical formulae as they tried to do it. He was convinced the country was a bad ally for Czechoslovakia to depend upon, and he distrusted the motives of every Frenchman who tried to flatter him.

It was only a deep, underlying sense of beauty and the value of creative expression which we both shared that gave us a basis for friendship. It was strong enough to make us tolerant of each other’s extreme unlikenesses in other respects. With women he was something of a mental sadist, lashing them with cutting sarcasm until he brought them to desperation. And yet they always came back for more because all women were mad about him. He thought I was stupid to waste my time on night club entertainers, as he had seen me do in Prague. He preferred the sport of breaking down the resistance of society girls, after which he lost interest in them and would abandon them in turn.

Because I remonstrated with him, begging him to let the girls down more gradually, he reproved me for being a masochist. Each time I had fallen in love, I had fallen all the way, torturing myself over every new affair. I called him brutal and cruel, and he tried to prove to me that my way of dealing with women in the old days in Prague was even more cruel because I allowed affairs to drag on through my fear of hurting others.

Men admired Berounský almost as much as women did, but he had few male friends. His mind was too sharp and he could undermine their overinflated self-esteem too easily. Aside from the fact that his ruthless realism was too strong a tonic for most of the men he knew, he would brook opposition and criticism from no one. No one, that is, except eventually from me. Our friendship flourished because it was based on an admitted need for each other. I was overly sentimental and emotional and he was overly sophisticated and objective. So each of us frankly used the other as a balance for our differing natures. He stole a little emotion from me to add some sentiment to his own life, and I began to depend upon him to pull me back into cold reality from the brink of being a sucker.

He had contracted malaria during the war and it left him with a mild form of hypochondria. He was continually worrying about his health and seeking new doctors for possible ills, but he never used these worries as a means of asking for sympathy. It was self-interest intensified. His penchant for sport clothes, in sharp contrast to the accepted propriety of custom-tailored business suits in Prague, had no explanation that I could ever find. Women thought his manner of dress an added attraction.

I found myself telling about my marriage that first night we met in Paris, and in the telling I doubtless fell over backward in taking all blame upon myself as a measure of self-punishment. Karel listened laconically, the scalp on his forehead occasionally moving upward from his eyes and down again. When I had said everything I intended to reveal, he brushed aside my sentiments with a single phrase. It was the total answer to him, and because he saw it so clearly, it was the final answer for me.

“Send her home,” he said. That was all. In those three words he implied that I was doing Toni no good by letting her stay on in Paris, and I was certainly doing myself no good by allowing her to continue to humiliate me.

Karel went back to Prague in a few days and shortly before the end of December in 1928 Toni went home, too. I saw her off on the train and later a divorce was arranged, to the relief of us both.

As soon as one mistake was rectified, the chance to remedy others followed. I looked up from my desk at Wagons-Lits one day to see two men approaching me whom I would have avoided by running away if I could have done so. They recognized me as they caught my eye and were as astonished as I was chagrined. One was a director of the Associated Bank in Prague and the other was general manager of the largest clay deposit company in Europe. I welcomed them politely, but with none of the familiarity which had existed in our relationship in Prague, and in turn they hid their own embarrassment, for which I was grateful. They insisted that I join them for dinner after I had taken care of their train accommodations, but I refused on the pretext of another engagement. They left Paris without my seeing them again.

The encounter shook me. With Toni gone, I no longer felt any necessity for keeping my job with Wagons-Lits. I heard from Karel Berounský occasionally now and the crisp phrases of his comments encouraged me to take stock of myself. The only way I could do so to advantage was to be free of the counter job. In walking the streets of Paris, I thought, getting back into touch with Frenchmen instead of tourists, I could find an answer to my problems. So I turned in my resignation.

I met Chedeville one evening in the Café Weber, the third chance meeting in three years with old friends. We found strangely little to talk about. He had been in Berlin much of the time since I left Prague; Arthur Randles had returned to Canada and Willy Kolovrat had gone off to the Argentine. He asked about my wife and I explained shortly that she had returned to her family. His interest accelerated with that piece of news; since we were now definitely separated he felt free to tell me what a mad thing I had done to leave my position in the bank and take up my fortune with the Wiesners instead. None of my old friends could understand why I had done it.

I listened to him idly, wondering what he would say if he could know that he was the one and only cause of my leaving the bank and my subsequent marriage to Toni. The situation was ironic, but it was no help in bringing us closer together again. After an hour or so he went off with the promise of looking me up as soon as he got back in town, but I never saw him again. He died a few weeks later.

One evening in January when I put my key in the lock of the apartment on Rue des Longchamps I found a note on the letterhead of the Associated Bank, telling me that if I contemplated a return to Prague in the near future there might be an interesting position open for me which could only be discussed in person. I was tremendously excited, but at the same moment I knew I could never go back to Prague under such conditions, for if nothing came of the discussion I would look more of a fool than ever.

I let days go by, fighting with myself because I longed to go home and yet was too proud to take the chance. Another letter came in the now very shaky handwriting of Mother. She had heard that my wife was back in Prague. I must never forget, she said, that no matter what had happened to me through these years in Paris there was always one person in the world who was waiting for me. It was as though she knew of my inner fight and was answering me in her own way.

Her letter sounded more resolute than I had ever known her. Though she begged me to come home where I belonged, she also added: “Do not speak and do not think about the past years you have gone through. You will go on now by your own strength as though you had never been away.”

I knew there was no longer any need to fight with myself. I packed my belongings, turned in the key of the apartment to the concierge and caught the afternoon train from the Gare de l’Est. January is as good a time to leave Paris as April is a good time to meet it first.