"Every time I see one of those concierges," said Jay, "I am reminded of how in the Middle Ages they believed that a cat must be buried in the walls of a newly built house; it would bring luck. I feel that these are the cats come back to avenge themselves by losing your mail and misleading visitors."

Through an entrance as black and as narrow as the entrance to Mayan tombs, they entered gentle courtyards, with humble flower pots in bloom, a cracked window one expected to be opened by Ninon de L'Enclos. The smallness of the window, the askewness of the frame, the hood of the grey pointed slate roof overhanging it had been painted so many times on canvas that it receded into the past, fixed, eternal, like the sea-shell colored clouds suspended in time which could not be blown away by a change of wind.

Jay was sitting at the small coffee-stained table like a hunter on the watch for adventure. Lillian said: "The painters and the writers heightened these places and those people so well that they seem more alive than today's houses, today's people. I can remember the words spoken by Leon Paul Fargue more than the words I hear today. I can hear the very sound of his restless cane on the pavement better than I can hear my own footsteps. Was their life as rich, as intense? Was it the artist who touched it up?"

Time and art had done for Suzanne Valadon, the mother of Utrillo, what Jay would never do for Sabina. Flavor by accretion, poetry by decantation. The artists of that time had placed their subject in a light which would forever entrance us, their love re-infected us. By the opposite process which he did not understand, but which he shared with many other artists of his time, he was conveying his inability to love. It was his hatred he was painting.