The Diver

In a side street on the right bank of the Seine where the river divides at the Ile de la Cité, there is a yellow and red brick building shared by a firm of leather merchants. When I was twenty I worked there. The hours were long, the pay was low, and the place smelled of cigarettes and boots. I hated it. I had come to Paris to be a writer but my money had run out and in this office I had to stick. How often I looked across the river envying the free lives of the artists and writers on the other bank. Being English, I was the joke of the office. The sight of my fat pink innocent face and fair hair made everyone laugh; my accent was bad, for I could not pronounce a full “o”; worst of all, like a fool, I not only admitted I hadn’t got a mistress, but boasted about it. To the office boys this news was extravagant. It doubled them up. It was a favourite trick of theirs, and even of the salesman, a man called Claudel with whom I had to work, to call me to the street door at lunchtime and then, if any girl or woman passed, they would give me a punch and shout:

“How much to sleep with this one? Twenty? Forty? A hundred?” I put on a grin, but, to tell the truth, a sheet of glass seemed to come down between me and any female I saw.

About one woman the lads did not play this game. She was a woman between thirty and forty I suppose, Mme. Chamson, who kept the menders and cleaners down the street. You could hear her heels as she came, halfrunning, to see Claudel, with jackets and trousers of his on her arm. He had some arrangement with her for getting his suits cleaned and repaired on the cheap. In return—well, there was a lot of talk. She had sinfully tinted hair built up high over arching, exclaiming eyebrows, hard as varnish and when she got near our door there was always a joke coming out of the side of her mouth. She would bounce into the office in her tight navy blue skirt, call the boys and Claudel together, shake hands with them all, and tell them some tale which always ended, with a dirty glance around, in whispering. Then she stood back and shouted with laughter. I was never in this secret circle and if I happened to grin, she gave me a severe and offended look and marched out scowling. One day, when one of her tales was over, she called back from the door:

“Standing all day in that gallery with all those naked women, he comes home done for, finished.”

The office boys squeezed each other with pleasure. She was talking about her husband who was an attendant at the Louvre, a small moist-looking fellow whom we sometimes saw with her, a man fond of fishing, whose breath smelled of white wine. Because of her arrangement with Claudel, and her stories, she was a very respected woman.

I did not like Mme. Chamson; she looked to me like some predatory bird; but I could not take my eyes off her pushing bosom and her crooked mouth. I was afraid of her tongue. She caught on quickly to the fact that I was the office joke, but when they told her on top of this I wanted to be a writer, any curiosity she had about me was finished. “I could tell him a tale,” she said. For her I didn’t exist. She didn’t even bother to shake hands with me.

Streets and avenues in Paris are named after writers; there are statues to poets, novelists and dramatists, making gestures to the birds, nursemaids and children in the gardens. How was it these men had become famous? How had they begun? For myself, it was impossible to begin. I walked about packed with stories, but when I sat in cafés or in my room with a pen in...