We drink another gin and tonic (my third). Paris begins to collapse upon me. I’ve been here for three hours already and I still have the plane turbines droning in my ears. If I went to my hotel now, I’d tumble into bed and sleep the rest of the day away. So I drink another coffee (and take another Pervitin on the sly). He acts like he doesn’t notice. For the moment (as if he realizes that I don’t want him watching), he wraps himself up in a newspaper. I know that he scarcely ever reads the papers, that nothing in them interests him. So he is only pretending to read; he puts down the paper the instant I swallow the pill. In a chatty tone he asks me about Hamburg. But I interrupt and ask how he found me. A piece of cake: he asked for me in the hotel and was told that I went out right away; the most obvious thing was to check here.

This rankles me. I’m annoyed that I’m so predictable. An unimaginative provincial who arrives in Paris and can’t think of anything better to do than sit on the terrace of the Deux Magots. He actually says as much quite brazenly:

“Nice sitting out here, isn’t it? Especially on such a lovely day. One learns quickly that it doesn’t get any better here in Paris. Nothing is quite what it is. But everything’s bursting with clues to an artificial superreality. That guy over there, squinting so obstinately, is not Sartre, but he could be. And that gay Negro is not Baldwin, but he could be, and why shouldn’t one take him for Baldwin? After all, the wild strawberries at Maxim’s were grown in a hothouse, but that doesn’t ruin the tarte aux fraises. On the contrary, it’s what guarantees perfection. It’s as if the mixture of types here had been very skillfully prescribed by a public-relations firm working for the Ministry of the Interior: not inauthentic—that wouldn’t seem Parisian—but simply artificial. Imagine how gladly you’d have stayed in Hamburg if there too the thugs and loiterers in the whores’ alleys of the Reeperbahn were on fixed salaries, paid by Hamburg’s Cultural Affairs Department.”

These are attempts at needling me—but they are too circuitous to penetrate my skin. I feel much more lucid now: the Pervitin is taking effect. But I can’t stand it here anymore. I suggest a walk. The place de Furstenberg is a few yards away. (“Almost quite genuinely Parisian, especially if you bear in mind that a church tower designed by Buffet casts its shadow upon it . . .” He’s bending over backward now and frazzling my nerves.)