‘All right. But what can we do? It seems to me that the only thing is to pawn our overcoats and get some food.’

‘We’ll do that, of course, but I must get my possessions out of this house first. To think of my photographs being seized! Well, my plan is ready. I’m going to forestall the Jew and shoot the moon myself. Foutre le camp–retreat, you understand. I think that is the correct move, eh?’

‘But my dear Boris, how can you, in daytime? You’re bound to be caught.’

‘Ah well, it will need strategy, of course. Our patron is on the watch for people slipping out without paying their rent; he’s been had that way before. He and his wife take it in turns all day to sit in the office–what misers, these Frenchmen! But I have thought of a way to do it, if you will help.’

I did not feel in a very helpful mood, but I asked Boris what his plan was. He explained it carefully.

‘Now listen. We must start by pawning our overcoats. First go back to your room and fetch your overcoat, then come back here and fetch mine, and smuggle it out under cover of yours. Take them to the pawnshop in the Rue des Francs Bourgeois. You ought to get twenty francs for the two, with luck. Then go down to the Seine bank and fill your pockets with stones, and bring them back and put them in my suitcase. You see the idea? I shall wrap as many of my things as I can carry in a newspaper, and go down and ask the patron the way to the nearest laundry. I shall be very brazen and casual, you understand, and of course the patron will think the bundle is nothing but dirty linen. Or if he does suspect anything, he will do what he always does, the mean sneak; he will go up to my room and feel the weight of my suitcase. And when he feels the weight of stones he will think it is still full. Strategy, eh? Then afterwards I can come back and carry my other things out in my pockets.’

‘But what about the suitcase?’

‘Oh, that? We shall have to abandon it. The miserable thing only cost twenty francs. Besides, one always abandons something in a retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.’

Boris was so pleased with this scheme (he called it une ruse de guerre) that he almost forgot being hungry. Its main weakness–that he would have nowhere to sleep after shooting the moon–he ignored.

At first the ruse de guerre worked well. I went home and fetched my overcoat (that made already nine kilometres, on an empty belly) and smuggled Boris’s coat out successfully. Then a hitch occured. The receiver at the pawnshop, a nasty sour-faced interfering little man–a typical French official–refused the coats on the ground that they were not wrapped up in anything. He said that they must be put either in a valise or a cardboard box. This spoiled every-thing, for we had no box of any kind, and with only twenty-five centimes between us we could not buy one.