The other way was to climb steeply up to the edge of the woods and then go across
the top of the hills through the pine woods, and then out to the edge of a meadow and
down across this meadow to the bridge. There were birches along the stream and it was
not big, but narrow, clear and fast, with pools where it had cut under the roots of the
birches. At the Hotel in Triberg the proprietor had a fine season. It was very pleasant and
we were all great friends. The next year came the inflation and the money he had made the
year before was not enough to buy supplies to open the hotel and he hanged himself. You
could dictate that, but you could not dictate the Place Contrescarpe where the flower
sellers dyed their flowers in the street and the dye ran over the paving where the autobus
started and the old men and the women, always drunk on wine and bad mare; and the
children with their noses running in the cold; the smell of dirty sweat and poverty and
drunkenness at the Cafe' des Amateurs and the whores at the Bal Musette they lived
above. The concierge who entertained the trooper of the Garde Republicaine in her loge,
his horse-hair-plumed helmet on a chair. The locataire across the hall whose husband was
a bicycle racer and her joy that morning at the cremerie when she had opened L'Auto and
seen where he placed third in Paris-Tours, his first big race. She had blushed and laughed
and then gone upstairs crying with the yellow sporting paper in her hand. The husband of
the woman who ran the Bal Musette drove a taxi and when he, Harry, had to take an early
plane the husband knocked upon the door to wake him and they each drank a glass of
white wine at the zinc of the bar before they started. He knew his neighbors in that quarter
then because they all were poor.