I hung up my English overcoat and grey felt hat on that same peg behind me, and after I had allowed the waiter time for at least twenty photographers to snap their fill of him, I ordered a coffee. He poured me out a glass of the familiar, purplish stuff with a green wandering light playing over it, and shuffled off, and I sat pressing my hands against the glass because it was bitterly cold outside. Suddenly I realized that quite apart from myself, I was smiling. Slowly I raised my head and saw myself in the mirror opposite. Yes, there I sat, leaning on the table, smiling my deep, sly smile, the glass of coffee with its vague plume of steam before me and beside it the ring of white saucer with two pieces of sugar. I opened my eyes very wide. There I had been for all eternity, as it were, and now at last I was coming to life. . . . It was very quiet in the café. Outside, one could just see through the dusk that it had begun to snow. One could just see the shapes of horses and carts and people, soft and white, moving through the feathery air. The waiter disappeared and reappeared with an armful of straw. He strewed it over the floor from the door to the counter and round about the stove with humble, almost adoring gestures. One would not have been surprised if the door had opened and the Virgin Mary had come in, riding upon an ass, her meek hands folded over her big belly. . . . That’s rather nice, don’t you think, that bit about the Virgin? It comes from the pen so gently; it has such a “dying fall.” I thought so at the time and decided to make a note of it. One never knows when a little tag like that may come in useful to round off a paragraph. So, taking care to move as little as possible because the “spell” was still unbroken (you know that?), I reached over to the next table for a writing pad. No paper or envelopes, of course. Only a morsel of pink blotting-paper, incredibly soft and limp and almost moist, like the tongue of a little dead kitten, which I’ve never felt. I sat—but always underneath, in this state of expectation, rolling the little dead kitten’s tongue round my finger and rolling the soft phrase round my mind while my eyes took in the girls’ names and dirty jokes and drawings of bottles and cups that would not sit in the saucers, scattered over the writing pad. They are always the same, you know. The girls always have the same names, the cups never sit in the saucers; all the hearts are stuck and tied up with ribbons. But then, quite suddenly, at the bottom of the page, written in green ink, I fell on to that stupid, stale little phrase: _Je ne parle pas français._