I was in a rut. I felt I must get out of it. It did not take me long to
make up my mind. I told the friend with whom I shared the flat that I
wanted to be rid of it and go abroad. He could not keep it by himself,
but we luckily found a middle-aged gentleman who wished to install his
mistress in it, and was prepared to take it off our hands. We sold the
furniture for what it could fetch, and within a month I was on my way to
Paris. I took a room in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank.

A few months before this, I had been fortunate enough to make friends
with a young painter who had a studio in the Rue Campagne Première. His
name was Gerald Kelly. He had had an upbringing unusual for a painter,
for he had been to Eton and to Cambridge. He was highly talented,
abundantly loquacious, and immensely enthusiastic. It was he who first
made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently
been accepted by the Luxembourg. To my shame, I must admit that I could
not make head or tail of them. Without much searching, I found an
apartment on the fifth floor of a house near the Lion de Belfort. It had
two rooms and a kitchen, and cost seven hundred francs a year, which was
then twenty-eight pounds. I bought, second-hand, such furniture and
household utensils as were essential, and the _concierge_ told me of a
woman who would come in for half a day and make my _café au lait_ in the
morning and my luncheon at noon. I settled down and set to work on still
another novel. Soon after my arrival, Gerald Kelly took me to a
restaurant called Le Chat Blanc in the Rue d'Odessa, near the Gare
Montparnasse, where a number of artists were in the habit of dining;
and from then on I dined there every night. I have described the place
elsewhere, and in some detail in the novel to which these pages are meant
to serve as a preface, so that I need not here say more about it. As a
rule, the same people came in every night, but now and then others came,
perhaps only once, perhaps two or three times. We were apt to look upon