INNOCENTS ABROAD
33
been ignoring the whole episode, stood up, leapt across their table, and
plunged down a long flight of stone steps. When the Murphys reached
her she was cut and bleeding but not seriously hurt. She offered no
explanation or excuse; probably she knew none. But by now, though it
was late in the evening, both Fitzgeralds felt they must go on to
something exciting. Scott proposed-for want of better perhaps-that
they put
all
the chickens they could find at the inn, some sixteen, on
the spit in the great fireplace and cook them. But the Murphys, sure
that the way to end this wild excitement was to remove the audience,
insisted on going home. Within half an hour the Fitzgeralds followed
them, but at a point on the road where
it
crossed a trolley line, they
turned up the track and onto a trestle instead of following the road.
Their car bumped over the open ties a few yards and stalled; they
settled back in their seats and fell asleep, though they had been
told many times that the trolley came around a blind curve onto the
trestle at high speed and that even the crossing was very dangerous.
They were found the next morning by a peasant, up early to take his
vegetables to market, and carried to safety by him less then twenty
minutes before the morning trolley crashed into their car and smashed
it to pieces.
By an odd and characteristic turn of mind, it was while
this
"great time" at Antibes was in progress that Fitzgerald conceived the
plan for
Our Type,
a novel on which he was to work for three years
before giving up the entire plot and most of what he had actually
written and starting afresh.
Our Type- it
was also called at one time
or another
The Boy Who Killed His Mo·ther
and
World's Fair-is
the story of a talented boy, Francis Melarky, who makes a success
in Hollywood as a technician and then is brought to the Riviera by
his
mother for a vacation. His father is serving a long prison term, ap–
parently for some crime of violence; there is a suggestion that Francis
has inherited a murderous temper. Francis' mother is a commonplace
and conventional woman distinguished only by her unscrupulous de–
termination to retain possession of Francis; there is bad feeling be–
tween them from the beginning. It is quite clear that Fitzgerald in–
tended to have Francis kill his mother-"Will you ask somebody," he
wrote Perkins, "what is done if one American murders another in
France.... In a certain sense my plot is not unlike Dreiser's in the
American Tragedy." This idea of murder had been central from the
