NEW INNOCENTS ABROAD
287
who know where all the negatives in the neighborhood are." Then
pointing to the notebook: "Now these people really have their ter–
ritories organized." At this moment he happened to catch my eye as I
eavesdropped across the table, but his reaction seemed to be that I
must feel neglected by all this attention to the other, for a little while
later he came around the table to inquire solicitously where I was
headed for tomorrow. When I told him I was returning to Paris, he
advised me to look up a certain bar off the Champs Elysees. What
would I find there, I wondered, and he told me that this bar kept a
big book listing all the "gay" spots on the Continent. Anyone return–
ing to Paris from a trip on which he has found a new "gay" cafe
or bar writes it down in this book, with whatever comments will be
useful to other travelers who intend to go to that part of the world. I
was suddenly reminded of the Big Book at the various outposts of
the American Express, where the travelers inscribe their names, ad–
dresses, and destinations, still maintaining all the threads of the
tourist's social life while
en route.
Apparently, the fraternity of the
gay is a network as carefully organized as the American Express,
and, like the latter, now takes in the whole of Europe as its territory.
II I
Back in Paris, the end of the summer seems already to have
passed me by as I stare out mournfully at the grey weather that
enshrouds the city. It has been a grim season of drought for all of
Europe, and this is the first good rain I have encountered for months,
but I salute it dolefully for, as luck would have it, I lost my rain–
coat moving around Europe and have just had a drenching. I have
to sit waiting by the window, damp in body, trying to dry myself out
with a blanket over my shoulders, and damp in soul too, for though
this weather brings out at first all the grey elegance of Paris, its
continuing murk begins to eat into one's mood like a spiritual cancer.
When Paris is grey, an Italian had warned me before I left Italy,
it can drive one to madness. Beyond the block of grey houses at
which I am staring is another just like it, and beyond that and again
beyond that a little house on the Ile St Louis with a plaque an–
nouncing that Charles Baudelaire once lived there, and right now
I feel just how he must have sat day after day, trying to roll away
the heavy stone of his
acedia,
staring out on just such a grey Paris