INNOCENTS ABROAD
35
and things had gone stale. " ...
If
somebody would come along," says
the heroine of
Save Me the Walt;:;
of this time, "to remind us about
how we felt about things when we felt the way they remind us of,
maybe it would refresh us." They quarreled with the Murphys and
Fitzgerald had a nasty argument with Robert McAlmon, one of the
minor expatriates. Their apartment in the Rue de Tilsitt, like nearly
every place they ever lived, was uncomfortable; it "smelled of a
church chancery because it was impossible to ventilate" and turned
out to be "a perfect breeding place for the germs of bitterness they
brought with them from the Riviera."
In
January, because Zelda
was
ill
again, they went to Salies de Beam in the Pyrenees.
In
May they moved on to the Riviera, where they took a hand–
some house called the Villa St. Louis in Juan-Ies-Pins; in a moment
of enthusiasm Fitzgerald told Perkins that they were "wonderfully
situated in a big house on the shore with a beach and the Casino not
100 yds. away and every prospect of a marvelous summer."
In
June
they went back to Paris to have "Zelda's appendix neatly removed,"
but otherwise they stayed on the Riviera until late autumn.
It
was a
gay time; the Murphys were there to give their fine parties and
sooner or later nearly everyone seemed to tum up on the Riviera. They
dined with Grace Moore in Monte Carlo and were fascinated by the
odd gentleman who was always around for dinner in a leopard skin;
not even Fitzgerald and Charles MacArthur had thought of that trick,
though they spent much of the summer thinking up similar stunts.
Once they planned to saw a waiter in two (with a musical saw to
"eliminate any sordidness") to see what was inside him, but Zelda
told them it was not worth it, that they would only find old menus
and tips and broken china and pencil stubs. Another time they lured
the orchestra from the Hotel Provenc;al to the Villa St. Louis, locked
them in a room with a bottle of whiskey, and settled down outside
the door for an evening of listening to their old favorites. The orches–
tra grew weaker and weaker, but Fitzgerald and MacArthur did not,
and the poor musicians did not escape till dawn.
Adding Ben Finney to their staff they wrote and photographed,
on the grounds of the Hotel du Cap, a movie about a Princess Alluria,
the wickedest woman in Europe. MacArthur wrote in an "incest
theme" with the Japanese ambassador as what he called the "inces–
tor," and they spent a good many of their evenings thinking up un-
