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1 1 THERE WAS AN OLD MAN OF MAJORCA By 1921 Flandrau again was restless and depressed. “More and more,” he wrote Blair, “life seems to me to be a short, uncertain sort of visit.” He looked older than his fifty-one years. His hair, a vibrant red-auburn in his youth, now was a sickly yellow-white. He tried to have it dyed, but it turned to a “bewildering cluster of copper ringlets.” In Avignon, he allowed a barber to dye his eyebrows, but they came out purple. “I do hope,” a mortified Clark muttered during the drive to the Riviera, “we won’t meet anyone we know.” Flandrau suffered excruciating stomach pains from overdrinking and overeating , including his weakness, raw onions. He drank large amounts of Vichy mineral water and white wine at dinner to try to alleviate the pain. Several of his teeth had to be pulled. He noticed a numbness in his right hand, so much at times he could put it under very cold or very warm water and not feel a thing though his fingers turned pale green. Despite the numbness and painful neuritis when he tried to write, he contributed to the St. Paul Daily News as late as December 1923 at $15 an offering. Boredom set in. He longed for a new setting to challenge his lively mind and rejuvenate his creativity. He wanted very much to write, but so little held his interest. He joked about his health in his letters. His passport photo was “a striking portrait of the kind Who has not indulged in this selfish dream of disappearing one fine morning, of abandoning his affairs, his habits, his acquaintances and even his friends, to settle in some enchanted island and live without worries, without commitments and, finally, without newspapers? George Sand, Winter in Majorca, 1839 of Baptist minister who elopes with the pretty little nineteen-year-old choir soprano.” Despite his distaste for the “hordes of nouveaux riche, of bedraggled artists” flocking to postwar France, he joined the exodus . In late February Clark dutifully packed his master’s trunks. Flandrau had not been to France in almost a quarter century. He wanted to see what the war had done to his ancestral homeland for which he had such great affection. A few years earlier simply viewing an exhibit of French landscape etchings in St. Paul — especially one of a village with a very long, straight, receding road bordered by poplars — gave him a “tightening about the throat, and an uncomfortable weakness of the eyes.” On the eve of his journey he was beset with anxiety. “During the day,” he wrote Patty confessing every traveler’s fear, “the prospect of a change usually seems a pleasant one . . . at night, though, I sometimes — often in fact, actually suffer acute pangs of anticipatory home-sickness, I feel sort of panic stricken and almost want to back out. . . . No doubt it arises from being at home so much of the time. . . . I really haven’t in many ways, nearly as much courage as I used to have, and greatly hope that this pulling myself out of the comfortable rut for a few months, moving about, coming more into contact with people, may to some extent bring it back. . . . Circumstances and temperament have combined to make me a singularly detached old person.” He often recalled what Professor Copeland had told him in jest at Harvard, with what later seemed like great insight, that he really was nothing more than “an old fashioned garden.” In New York, he saw old classmates, perhaps at the Harvard Club, including estranged traveling companion Pat Brice (doing nothing more than managing his parents’ estate), who looked degenerate, so grossly overweight the fat on his neck had changed his voice. At the aging Delmonico ’s at 44th and 5th, Fitzgerald — living on West 59th, struggling with The Beautiful and Damned, already begging advance loans from Scribner’s — “drifted magnificently in” past the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows in the Palm Garden and greeted him during lunch. A month later, “dry agents” raided the restaurant, arresting a waiter and manager for serving vodka and gin. Two years later, drained of energy and liquor by Prohibition, Delmonico’s closed forever. Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick, hearing Flandrau was traveling again, seemed anxious to have him do some stories about Spain, but Flandrau demurred. He sailed with Clark from New York March 1 on the SS Rotterdam for...

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