SOME time after this Lewis went to supper with a famous Champagne merchant who, in spite of his age and a rather assailable position, still financed a good number of charming little ladies. After crossing one of those streets in the Champ de Mars which seem to be cut in butter, Lewis entered a little house at an hour when there were no longer any servants about: anyone who liked could go in by the open door. Unlike the Magnac Salon, it was an unfashionable house, in other words an amusing one, full of pretty women and good vintage wine (that pink 1911, like disguised raspberry syrup), and where no expense was spared for the entertainment of the guests; even to the extent of having gifts beneath every napkin. The host was celebrating that evening the thirtieth anniversary of a secret malady which had not interfered with his tempestuous mode of life. To this party, of which Paris had been talking for weeks, he had invited all the specialists who had treated him during these thirty years, and even the lady to whom he owed what was, after all, so little worry, and whom he discovered at Laval where she ran a church furnishing shop. She sat opposite him at the head of his table, wearing a bonnet and a dress of Alençon lace. Lewis was at the daffodil table (each table being named after a colour), next to Hector Lazarides who was sucking at his Homard à l'Americaine and wearing a helmet with a nose-piece which made him look like the Greeks of Pericles in Duruy's manual. Lazarides was an old Greek parasite who, after twenty centuries, still remained the Gnatho of ancient comedy, and who lived in an attic facing the Tuileries in a hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. A gay old sentimental corsair, he hawked things about, looked after his friends' wives and took them out, stayed in bed when he had no victims, "fallen between two mugs," he used to say, or, "in the dead season," and if by some oversight he was asked down to the country he never left. (To such a point that the Prince de Waldeck had to have the wing in which he had put him up for one night pulled down after two years in order to get rid of him.) He was always asking people to find him something to do. When anyone offered him a job he would refuse with dignity, saying: "I can make more than that by borrowing." An impecunious old snob, he had only abandoned the scepticism of a lifetime at the sight of his fallen monarch, whom he set about serving with a guilty fervour. But even this did him no good, because far from his Francophobia strengthening his social position in Paris, as it generally does. Fate willed that people should frown on it; so that he was thenceforth, like this evening, forced to spend the night amongst the higher strata of commerce. He could not be too civil to Lewis, taking off his helmet, bowing his head on which three hairs still curled like electric bell wires. Lewis brought the conversation round to Greece and to Irene.