BERNARD AVISHAI
233
gence gathering and copy writing.
In
his first three months on the job,
during which he reported on it almost daily, he actually set foot in the
Chamber of Deputies only one time. And only once did Koestler bungle
his duties: one morning in October, he passed a story to
B.
Z.
Am Mit–
tag
predicting, on wholly specious grounds, the imminent collapse of
the Briand government. When nothing happened during the day, his
chief was livid-except that, fortuitously, the government actually did
fall that evening, for reasons Koestler knew nothing about.
"It
was one
of the few occasions, " Koestler recalls wistfully, "when
I
had been right
for the wrong reasons-a more cheering experience than to be wrong
for the right reasons, as
I
mostly seem to be."
III.
COZy STINK
THE HOURS AT THE ULLSTEIN BUREAU were taxing, but not exhausting.
His confidence provisionally restored, Koestler made time for a rather
more desultory night life of bawdy-houses and cafes-especially after a
change in shift required him to stay up through the night most of the
week. His impressions of the French grew more true to form. He began
to notice that the second-class carriage of the Metro emitted a "cozy
stink," that its riders insinuated a certain defensive meanness, that their
mistresses were "unattractive."
On se defend.
But he came to his senses
in another way, too. This was the Paris of Hemingway and Cocteau,
after all. Koestler's appetite for sex became avid. He grew curiously con–
tent in his restiveness . Paris seemed to him "an adulterous town," frigid
to her legitimate masters, passionate to the passing stranger.
At times, Koestler would stroll down to Les HaIles and swill oysters
and wine. He would watch mountains of produce being unloaded by
stolid men-people, who, like him, experienced a sad comradeship, peo–
ple who knew the torture of alarm clocks and felt contempt for drunks .
But it was other night workers, Paris prostitutes, who particularly fas–
cinated him, and he writes about them at length. There was more than
the consolation of their beds here.
In
this crossing of sex and the mar–
ket, Koestler had his first chance to make out those shadows of desire
that eventually appeared on his analyst's walls. The whores, he instructs
us, were only human.
There were two types, Koestler writes: those who were
serieuses
and
those who were not. The former worked in closed houses and observed
a strict code of etiquette, serving a more or less stable group of middle–
class men. Their houses had parlors, with leather benches and easy
crowds. Men periodically brought their wives to chatter with the
