Placed before a simple meal he would begin his prestidigitations: this steak is wonderful...how good it is. How awfully good! And the onions... He made sounds of delight. He poured his enthusiasm over the meal like a new condiment. The steak began to glow, to expand, to multiply under the warmth of his fervor. Every dish was wrapped in amorous appreciation, as if it had been brought to the table with a fire burning under it and was flaming in rum like a Christmas pudding.

"Good, good, good," said his palate, said his roseate cheeks, said his bowed assenting head, said his voice, all expanding in prodigious additions, as if he were pushing multiple buttons of delight, and colors burst from the vegetables, meat, salad, cheese and wine. Even the parsley assumed a festive air like a birthday candle on a cake. "Ah, ah, ah, the salad!" he said, pouring over it a voice like an unguent along with the olive oil.

His pleasure donned the white cap of the proud chef playing gay scales of flavors, festooning the bread and wine with the high taste of banquets.

The talk, too, burst its boundaries. He started a discussion, let it take fire and spread, but the moment it took too rigid a form he began to laugh, spraying it, liquefying it in a current of gaiety.

To laugh. To laugh. "I'm not laughing at you. I'm not laughing at anyone, at anybody. I just can't help myself. I don't care a bit, not a bit, who's right."

"But you must care," said Faustin, speaking through a rigid mask of sadness which made his face completely static, and one was surprised that the words could come through the closed mouth. "You must care, you must hold on to something."

"I never hold on," said Jay. "Why hold on? Whatever you hold on to dies. There comes Colette. Sit here, Colette. How was the trade today? Colette, these people are talking about holding on. You must hold on, you must care, they say. Do you hold on, Colette? They pass like a stream, don't they, and you'd be surprised if the same ones bobbed up continuously, surprised and maybe bored. It's a good stream, isn't it, just a stream that does not nestle into you to become an ulcer, a good washing stream that cleanses as it flows, and flows clean through."

With this he drank fully from his Pernod, drank indeed as if the stream of absinthe, of ideas, feelings, talk, should pass and change every day guided only by thirst.

"You're drunk," said Colette. "You don't make sense."

"Only the drunks and the insane make sense, Colette, that's where you're wrong. Only the drunks and the insane have discarded the unessential for chaos, and only in chaos there is richness."

"If you go on this way," said Faustin, his finger pointing upward like a teacher of Sanskrit, "someone will have to take care of you while you spill in all directions recklessly. You'll need taking care of, for yours is no real freedom but an illusion of freedom, or perhaps just rebellion. Chaos always turns out to be the greatest trap of all in which you'll find yourself more securely imprisoned than anyone."