He was highly talented,
abundantly loquacious, and immensely enthusiastic. It was he who first
made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently
been accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must admit that I could
not make head or tail of them. Without much searching, I found an
apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the Lion de Belfort. It had
two rooms and a kitchen, and cost seven hundred francs a year, which was
then twenty-eight pounds. I bought, second-hand, such furniture and
household utensils as were essential, and the _concierge_ told me of a
woman who would come in for half a day and make my _cafe au lait_ in the
morning and my luncheon at noon. I settled down and set to work on still
another novel. Soon after my arrival, Gerald Kelly took me to a
restaurant called Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d'Odessa, near the Gare
Montparnasse, where a number of artists were in the habit of dining;
and from then on I dined there every night. I have described the place
elsewhere, and in some detail in the novel to which these pages are meant
to serve as a preface, so that I need not here say more about it.
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