After the initial cackling died down, I made out, from snatches of personal history, that the girls were interested in the damnedest things: the Russian philosopher Ouspenski, Yoga and yogurt, occult seances, strange gypsy herbs and potions. I bought another beer and moved over to the next table. * * * * * It seems that the Duchess and Madame Outre had been friends in Budapest, before the war. Then Hitler upset the apple cart and the Duchess hurriedly married a British Embassy chap, name of Dunscombe. That gave her diplomatic immunity and when war came, she got out on a sealed train and wound up in London. Not so the Madame. In Budapest she’d apparently presided over her own private seance, which was subsidized by the Hungarian elite. It was she who’d advised the future Duchess to wed the English diplomat. Anyway, Madame Outre eventually went to a concentration camp, and was down to eighty-five pounds at war’s end. Somehow she outwitted the Russians and got to Paris. There she fell in again with the Duchess, whose husband had taken a postwar Foreign Office job. The Duchess became her “sponsor,” helped round up a new set of clients, and the old Budapest seance was revived. Well, there’s probably more to it than that. But about a year ago the Duke was shifted to a U.N. post here in New York, and the Duchess’s entourage came along for the ride. And that brings us up to date, to the Cote d’Azur, me with my warm beer and the old biddies gabbling away like mad and collecting a larger audience by the minute. It seems that back in Budapest, Madame Outre had dabbled in perfumes, scented bath salts, and stuff like that for special friends. Now the girls, the Duchess in particular, were urging her to open a little shop in the Village. The Duchess up and proclaimed she’d be the bankroll. You get the drift, Sarge. Here am I, half in the bag, in a boite full of characters, with impressionistic paintings on the walls, a “bulletin board” tacked up with personal notes, apartment-swap deals, little theater announcements, abused-car ads, old stove and refrigerator deals. Add to that Madison Avenue publicity boys in crewcuts and charcoal suits; blonde nymphs in pony hair-dos and tight, oh very tight, suntan slacks; stevedores just off the docks; long-haired ex-G.I. art students--the whole gang, and the Budapest biddies to boot! My ears must have been wagging like red flags at a rifle range when Madame Outre spoke up. “_C’est fini_,” she said. “We shall have a shop, _oui. Parfums_ from my own formulas, _oui_. And even, mayhap, a young man to assist during busy hours.” She lifted her martini toward me in an amiable toast. I must have blushed like a kid. “Me and my big ears,” I mumbled. “We are a bunch of magpies,” Madame Outre replied. “You could not help overhearing. Be so good as to join us, _s’il vous plait_!”