“Stravinsky’s here,” said Hemingway. “What more do you want?”

“I want jazz,” said Frank. “I want all that fresh rhythm and excitement and improvisation of jazz. That’s in New York. And by the way,” he turned to Claire, “I know London theater has the best tradition in the world, but amazing things are happening in New York now. Eugene O’Neill will have five plays running on Broadway this season.”

But Hemingway wasn’t having it.

“If you’re going to write for the stage, Frank, then maybe. But none of the good writers of books and poetry want to be in New York. They’re all in London and Paris. Eliot, Pound, Fitzgerald. Everyone’s in Europe.”

“Not true. There’s a crowd of writers in New York. They hang out together at the Algonquin Hotel every week.”

“A bunch of old women,” Hemingway retorted.

“They’re not old women. They’re bright, and they’re young.”

“Give them time.”

It was obviously no use arguing with Hemingway, so Frank didn’t try. Soon they were all eating. The waiters put small candles on the table as the sun went down.

By the end of the main course, a certain mellowness had descended upon the table. Claire noticed that Chagall had taken out some crayons and was quietly doodling on the paper tablecloth. By the candlelight, it looked like a goat in a green space and a lady in a flowing dress flying through a deep blue sky.

But then Hemingway rapped on the table and said he was going to read from something. And she supposed it might be one of his latest stories, and she was eager to hear it, but it wasn’t his own, he told them.

“This is something I was shown in Shakespeare and Company the other day, and I liked it and thought you’d enjoy it too. It’s the opening to a story that’s still being written.”

Hemingway had a good voice for reading. It was a light baritone, unaccented, straightforward, like a correspondent reporting from a faraway place, and when he descended into the wide trench of the open vowels, his tone became somewhat gravelly.

But the place he was describing now, as he read from some sheets of typewritten paper, was not a war zone, nor was it an American forest, nor a big river or a mountain somewhere, but a long garden, and a wide French house, quite simple and provincial, with shutters on the windows, and a bed full of lavender and cornflowers where the bees hummed, and a veranda where an old man sat reading a newspaper, with his old wife who could no longer remember who he was, sitting by his side, and a pretty girl going into the house and past the kitchen where there was still a smell of oil and vinegar from a salad bowl that had been left on the wooden table.

And Claire realized that it was the house at Fontainebleau, and she stared at Frank, who was looking both embarrassed and pleased.