“Ah, then you should meet Monsieur Tarkington.” He turned his attention to a table by the far window at which a group of men were sitting. “He considers himself a fine poet—don’t you, monsieur?”

“Don’t I what?”

“Albert thinks you consider yourself a fine poet,” a young man with red hair said. The person who was being addressed, the Monsieur Tarkington, was an older, more sober-looking individual than the rest of his companions, in his dark three-piece suit with a watch chain draped across his vest. He had a sad-looking, not very handsome face.

“The very finest,” he said. “Although the world likes to think of me only as a novelist. Novels make money, so I write them, but poetry is the true stuff of art. You’re a poetess yourself, madame?”

“I write a little,” I said, stretching the truth.

He stood up. “Booth Tarkington. Come on over and join us. We’re deep in discussion on whether poetry per se needs form.”

I went over and took the chair he had pulled out for me. Coffee was brought and I drank gratefully. The damp coldness had combined with my fear to chill me to the bone. I noticed that some of the men at the table were drinking something bright green in small glasses. It was a fascinating color but I didn’t like to ask them what it was, not wanting to appear a neophyte.

“So you’ve just arrived in Paris, have you?” the young redhead asked, eyeing me with interest.

“I have and I’m trying to locate a couple of friends. One is also a poet, a Miss Elena Goldfarb from New York, and the other is the painter Willie Walcott.”

“I met the Goldfarb woman once at a reading,” another of them said. “A week or so ago. She read a poem. Not at all bad.”

“But you haven’t seen her since?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“What about Willie Walcott then?”

“Oh, him. He’s in here all the time,” the red-haired one said. “Stay put and he’ll show up. Especially if it’s around mealtime and someone might treat him to food. Willie is a great cadger, in spite of the fact that he must be dripping with family money.”

“I heard his father had cut off his allowance because he dropped out of Harvard,” the dark one at the end of the table said. “So he has to rely on selling his paintings or the charity of his friends.”

“Rather the latter than the former, I suspect,” Booth Tarkington said. “From what I saw the boy didn’t have too much talent. More a copier than an innovator—still stuck in Impressionism. At any rate he hasn’t managed to impress any of the top name dealers. Vollard won’t touch him.”

“Reynold Bryce seemed to take a shine to him,” someone suggested.