PARTISAN REVIEW
ejected them, that belonged to the Soviet Embassy. On the whole,
architecture, they felt, provided the most solid answer to their social
curiosity: the bedroom of Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon had
informed them that the French royal family were dwarfs, a secret
already hinted at in Mme Pompadour's bedroom at the Frick mu–
seum in New York; in Milan, they would meet the Sforzas through
the agency of their Castello; at Stra, on the Brenta, they would get
to know the Pisani. They had read Proust, and the decline of the
great names in modern times was accepted by them as a fact; the
political speeches of the living Count Sforza suggested the table-talk
of Mme Verdurin, gracing with her bourgeois platitudes the board
of an ancient house. Nevertheless, the sight of a rococo ceiling, a
great swaying crystal chandelier, glimpsed at night through an open
second-story window, would come to them like an invitation which
is known to exist but which has been incomprehensibly lost in the
mails; a vague sadness descended, yet they did not feel like outsiders.
Victors in a world war of unparalleled ferocity, heirs of im–
perialism and the philosophy of the enlightenment, they walked
proudly on the dilapidated streets of Europe. They had not approved
of the war and were pacifist and bohemian in their sympathies, but
the exchange had made them feel rich, and they could not help
showing it. The exchange had turned them into a prince and a
princess, and, considering the small bills, the weekly financial anxieties
that attended them at home, this was quite an accomplishment. There
was no door, therefore, that, they believed, would not open to them
should they present themselves fresh and crisp as two one-dollar bills.
These beliefs, these dreams, were, so far, no more to them than a
story children tell each other. The young man, in fact, had found
his small role as war-profiteer so distasteful and also so frightening
that he had refused for a whole week to go to his money-changer
and had cashed his checks at the regular rate at the bank. For the
most part, their practical, moral life was lived, guidebook in hand,
on the narrow streets and in the cafes of the Left Bank- the}' got few
messages at their hotel.
Yet occasionally when they went in their best clothes to a fash–
ionable bar, she wearing the flowers he had bought her (ten cents
in American money), they hoped in silent unison during the first
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