Boris always talked of the war as the happiest time of his life. War and soldiering were his passion; he had read innumerable books of strategy and military history, and could tell you all about the theories of Napoleon, Kutuzof, Clausewitz, Moltke and Foch. Anything to do with soldiers pleased him. His favourite café was the Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse, simply because the statue of Marshal Ney stands outside it. Later on, Boris and I sometimes went to the Rue du Commerce together. If we went by Metro, Boris always got out at Cambronne station instead of Commerce, though Commerce was nearer; he liked the association with General Cambronne, who was called on to surrender at Waterloo, and answered simply, ‘Merde!’

The only things left to Boris by the Revolution were his medals and some photographs of his old regiment; he had kept these when everything else went to the pawn-shop. Almost every day he would spread the photographs out on the bed and talk about them:

‘Voilà, mon ami! There you see me at the head of my company. Fine big men, eh? Not like these little rats of Frenchmen. A captain at twenty–not bad, eh? Yes, a captain in the Second Siberian Rifles; and my father was a colonel.

‘Ah, mais, mon ami, the ups and downs of life! A captain in the Russian Army, and then, piff! the Revolution–every penny gone. In 1916 I stayed a week at the Hôtel Edouard Sept; in 1920 I was trying for a job as night watchman there. I have been night watchman, cellarman, floor scrubber, dishwasher, porter, lavatory attendant. I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.

‘Ah, but I have known what it is to live like a gentleman, mon ami. I do not say it to boast, but the other day I was trying to compute how many mistresses I have had in my life, and I made it out to be over two hundred. Yes, at least two hundred… Ah, well, ça reviendra. Victory is to him who fights the longest. Courage!’ etc. etc.

Boris had a queer, changeable nature. He always wished himself back in the army, but he had also been a waiter long enough to acquire the waiter’s outlook. Though he had never saved more than a few thousand francs, he took it for granted that in the end he would be able to set up his own restaurant and grow rich. All waiters, I afterwards found, talk and think of this; it is what reconciles them to being waiters. Boris used to talk interestingly about hotel life:

‘Waiting is a gamble,’ he used to say; ‘you may die poor, you may make your fortune in a year. You are not paid wages, you depend on tips–ten per cent, of the bill, and a commission from the wine companies on champagne corks. Sometimes the tips are enormous. The barman at Maxim’s, for instance, makes five hundred francs a day. More than five hundred, in the season… I have made two hundred francs a day myself. It was at a hotel in Biarritz, in the season. The whole staff, from the manager down to the plongeurs, was working twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one hours’ work and two and a half hours in bed, for a month on end. Still, it was worth it, at two hundred francs a day.