“I need help,” I began but the young men laughed. “Then you are in the wrong place. None of us has a sou, chérie. That is why we come here. Bernarde is tolerant of us. He lets us sit here all day for the price of a cup of coffee.”

“No, forgive me,” I said. “Perhaps you can tell me how to locate some American painters.”

“There are no American painters in Paris,” one of the men said quickly, then noting my surprise added, “only copiers and dabblers.” At the murmur from his companions he turned to the man beside him. “What? You disagree? I confess that some of them have facility with the brushstroke. La Cassatt is not at all bad.”

“That’s decent of you, Pablo.” The man beside him dug him in the ribs. “She sells her paintings for more money than you, you must confess.”

“But when has an American ever created a new movement, a new school of art?” He waved his hands in dramatic gesture. He was small and dark with black hair flopping boyishly across his forehead and he spoke with a strong accent that clearly wasn’t French. “I hear they still think Impressionism is avant-garde in America.”

And the others grinned and chuckled.

“So you believe that the role of the painter is to constantly come up with something new, do you, Pablo?” one of them asked. “Not to paint with honesty the world as one sees it?”

“Are the two not one and the same?” Pablo demanded.

Before this turned into a philosophical discussion I interrupted. “Messieurs. A minute please. I have to find these American painters. So there are no American artists in your circle here?”

“Americans have money,” one of them said. “They would not choose to live and work in Le Bateau-Lavoir as we do.”

Bateau? That was a boat, surely, and Lavoir had something to do with laundry? “A laundry boat?” I asked. “But we are far from the river, are we not?”

This set them laughing. “We live and work on the slope of Montmartre, above us here,” a portly young man, rather better dressed than the rest, said to me. “We call our building Le Bateau-Lavoir because it reminds us of the flimsy way the laundry boats on the Seine are built with gaps between the floor boards. But to answer your question, there are no Americans among us, I regret.”

“Americans keep to themselves,” the small dark one called Pablo said. “They never seem to learn the language properly.”

The one in the well-cut suit roared with laughter at this. “That’s a good one coming from you, mon vieux.” He dug the small dark one in the side. “Your French is still atrocious.”

“I think I have learned it rather well,” the other replied haughtily, but they all laughed.

“You speak it with a lisp, like a girlish Spaniard,” a man across the table said.