Quartet

It was about half-past five on an October afternoon when Marya Zelli came out of the Café Lavenue, which is a dignified and comparatively expensive establishment on the Boulevar...

Marya, you must understand, had not been suddenly and ruthlessly transplanted from solid comfort to the hazards of Montmartre. Nothing like that. Truth to say, she was used to a...

‘Good evening, Madame Zelli,’ said the _patronne_ of the Hôtel de l’Univers. ‘Will you come in here for a moment? I have something to say to you. Edouard, give the lady a chair.’

_I fear that you must be most unquiet. Still I could not write for the reason that I was not allowed to up till yet. When I came in that evening I found two men waiting for me a...

She was cold. Her feet were soaked. She imagined that all the people in the restaurant looked sleek, tidy and placid, and envied their well-ordered lives. Then the vermouth warm...

Ten days later Stephan was tried and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment to be followed by expulsion from France. Marya went to the Santé to see him, feeling exhausted, listless,...

When the Paris tram to Fresnes stopped outside the café called the Cadran Bleu, Marya got down. She walked up a wide road bordered with magnificent trees to the prison, a high,...

At nine o’clock every morning the _femme de ménage_ tapped at the door of the little room where the grey and green striped curtains hung straightly over long windows, to announc...

The spring came early that year and very suddenly. So that one day the branches of the trees in the Luxembourg Gardens were bare and grim and the next they waved cool leaves in...

The Bal du Printemps is a small, dingy café in the Rue Mouffetard. There is a long zinc bar where the clients can drink a peaceful apéritif after the day’s work. There are paint...

Lois came into the room carrying a small flowered paper bag. ‘Hello, Mado, why are you sitting in this half-darkness?’ She put on the light near the door. ‘I’ve been running rou...

The three dined together at Lefranc’s the next evening. They sat, as usual, at a table in a little alcove at the end of the room, and Monsieur Lefranc (also as usual) hovered ab...

One afternoon at the end of April, whilst sitting in the Café du Dôme, drinking a gin and vermouth, Cairn, that imaginative and slightly sentimental young man, wrote the followi...

They sat facing her in the railway carriage and she looked at them with calmness, clear-sightedly, freed for one moment from her obsessions of love and hatred. They were so obvi...

Crowds of people were waiting at the Porte d’Orléans for the trams to Fresnes. They stood with phlegmatic patience, craning their necks, and each tram was immediately packed whe...

The little clock on the table by the bed was ticking so loudly that Marya got up and shut it away in a drawer. But she could still hear it, fussy and persistent. Then a train ga...

August was a hot, oppressive month, the sun beating down on sleepy streets, the cafés and restaurants nearly empty, the staircase and passages of the Hôtel du Bosphore and its f...

When Marya opened the door of Room 19 Stephan was sitting at the table writing a letter. He looked like some frail and shrunken apostle, his beard and hair flowed.

‘Nothing, Madame,’ answered the _patron_, smiling. Smiling? No, grinning was the word. Hateful man. He always grinned when he looked at her. She kept her mouth steady with an ef...

His eyes were very cautious. He was thinking that it wouldn’t do to leave the girl trailing round Montparnasse looking as ill as all that. She was lying huddled. As if there wer...

The beach was strewn with old sardine tins and fishing nets spread to dry in the sun. A little white boat, called _Je m’en fous_, heaved very slowly up and down at the end of it...

‘I’ve got a room for you in a hotel near the Gare du Nord,’ said Stephan. He took her arm protectingly. ‘You’re awfully tired, aren’t you? Stay here for a moment; give me the _f...

‘You think too much,’ said Monsieur Bernadet kindly. ‘That’s what’s the matter with you. When I saw you last night I said to myself: “That’s a pretty girl, but a girl who thinks...