He had at times the air of a gnome, a satyr, or at other times the air of a serious scholar. His body appeared fragile in proportion to his exuberance. His appetite for life was enormous. His parents had given him money to go to college. He had put it in his pocket and gone to wander all over America, taking any job that came along, and sometimes none, traveling with hoboes, as a hitchhiker, a fruit picker, a dishwasher, seeking adventure, enriching his experience. He did not see his parents again for many years. In one blow, he had severed himself from his childhood, his adolescence, from all his past.

What richness, Lillian felt, what a torrent. In a world chilled by the mind, his work poured out like a volcano and raised the surrounding temperature.

"Lillian, let's drink to my Pissoir Period. I have been painting the joys of urinating. It's wonderful to urinate while looking up at the Sacré Coeur and thinking of Robinson Crusoe. Even better still in the urinoir of the Jardin des Plantes, while listening to the roar of the lions, and while the monkeys, high up in the trees, watch the performance and sometimes imitate me. Everything in nature is good."

He loved the boiling streets. While he walked the streets he was happy. He learned their names amorously as if they were the names of women. He knew them intimately, noted those which disappeared and those which were born. He took Lillian to the Rue d'Ulm which sounded like a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, to the Rue Feuillantine which sounded like a soufflé of leaves, to the Quai de Valmy where the barges waited patiently in the locks for a change of level while the wives hung their laundry on the decks, watered their flower pots and ironed their lace curtains to make the barges seem more like cottages in the country. Rue de la Fourche, like the trident of Neptune or of the devil, Rue Dolent with its mournful wall encircling the prison. Impasse du Mont Tonnerre! How he loved the Impasse du Mont Tonnerre. It was guarded at the entrance by a small café, three round tables on the sidewalk. A rusted iron gate which once opened to the entrance of carriages, now left open. A hotel filled with Algerians who worked in a factory nearby. Rusty Algerian voices, monotone songs, shouts, spice smells, fatal quarrels, knife wounds.

Once having walked past the iron gate, over the uneven cobblestones, they entered the Middle Ages. Dogs were eating garbage, women were going to market in their bedroom slippers. An old concierge stared through half-closed shutters, her skin the color of a mummy, a shriveled mouth munching words he could not hear. "Who do you want to see?" The classical words of concierges. Jay answered: "Marat, Voltaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud."