Peter Whiffle by Carl Van Vechten — Read

It was many days before I saw Peter again. I met other men and women. I visited the Louvre and at first stood humbly in the Salon Carré before the Monna Lisa and in the long corridor of the Venus de Milo; a little later, I became thuriferous before Sandro Botticelli's frescoes from the Villa Lemmi and Watteau's Pierrot. I made a pilgrimage to the Luxembourg Gallery and read Huysmans's evocation of the picture before Moreau's Salome. I sat in the tiny old Roman arena, Lutetia's amphitheatre, constructed in the second or third century, and conjured up visions of lions and Christian virgins. I drank tea at the Pavilion d'Armenonville in the Bois and I bought silk handkerchiefs of many colours at the Galeries Lafayette. I began to carry my small change in a pig-skin purse and I learned to look out for bad money. Every morning I called for mail at the American Express Company in the Rue Scribe. I ate little wild strawberries with Crème d'Isigny. I bought old copies of l'Assiette au Beurre on the quais and new copies of Le Sourire at kiosques. I heard Werther at the Opéra-Comique and I saw Lina Cavalieri in Thaïs at the Opéra. I made journeys to Versailles, Saint Cloud, and Fontainebleau. I inspected the little hotel in the Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde died and I paid my respects to his tomb in Père-Lachaise. The fig-leaf was missing from the heroic figure on the monument.

It had been stolen, the cemetery-guard informed me, par une jeune miss anglaise, who desired a souvenir. I drank champagne cocktails, sitting on a stool, at the American bar in the Grand Hotel. I drank whisky and soda, ate salted nuts, and talked with English racing men at Henry's bar, under the delightful brown and yellow mural decorations, exploiting ladies of the 1880 period with bangs, and dresses with bustles, and over-drapings, and buttons down the front. I enjoyed long bus rides and I purchased plays in the arcades of the Odéon. I went to the races at Chantilly. I drank cocktails at Louis's bar in the Rue Racine. Louis Doerr, the patron, had worked as a bar-man in Chicago and understood the secrets of American mixed drinks. Doubtless, he could have made a Fireman's Shirt. He divided his time between his little bar and his atelier, where he gave boxing lessons to the students of the quarter. When he was teaching the manly art, Madame Doerr manipulated the shaker. I attended services at Les Hannetons and Maurice's Bar and I strolled through the Musée de Cluny, where I bought postcards of chastity belts and instruments of torture. I read Maupassant in the Parc Monceau. I took in the naughty revues at Parisiana, the Ba-ta-clan, and the Folies-Bergère. I purchased many English and American novels in the Tauchnitz edition and I discovered a miniature shop in the Rue de Furstenberg, where elegant reprints of bawdy eighteenth century French romances might be procured. I climbed to the top of the towers of Notre-Dame, particularly to observe a chimère which was said to resemble me, and I ascended the Tour Eiffel in an elevator.