Lewis, having successfully broken through that crust which our traditions and our morals pile up on youth, and having renounced the immortal principle of the commerce and the spirit of France, namely:--_always be suspicious of what you are creating_, had, among the first of his generation, struggled out into the open air. It enabled him to experience the obloquy that is always hurled at any form of youthful success. Exhausted France, divided between the struggle for existence and the struggle to keep up her reputation as a jealous nation, accepted his innovations with reluctance. In one year Lewis trebled his business interests and succeeded in getting hold of the controlling number of shares. Where before everything was done clandestinely (Lewis could almost hear Monsieur Vandémanque's: "good wine needs no bush"), all business was now conducted in the full glare of publicity; whereas before only one telephone line connected the Rue Scribe with the Bourse, now there were eighteen lines devoted solely to foreign exchange dealing. Lewis was now managing the Franco-African Bank and its affiliated companies practically without control, the Ætas Assurance Company, which was expanding enormously since its new re-insurance contract with Lloyds, and the Fidius Research Corporation (chemical products, commercial rubber, phosphates, oxygen). II EVERYONE had to toil up to the Père Lachaise cemetery to be present at the funeral orations. The only part of the journey that Lewis really liked was round the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, at the sight of the negro with his gold clock in his stomach over the _Nègre_ clock factory, of the flights of flaking steps which rose and fell like switchback railways, and in their reflections beneath the curves of the asphalt reminding him of the sloping of old market gardens; of the huge Empire houses built with the stones of the Bastille, and spattered here and there by rifle s during days when history was being made. The hearse, behind its team of horses and the coachman in soot-black, was sheathed in a dull sombreness in which only the mouths of the horses showed as damp, pink slits. Lewis watched the setting of the swollen sun tinging the spokes of the wheels, the buckled shoes of the master of ceremonies, the transparent orchids and the autumn foliage which left the scent of damp forests behind it. Suddenly Lewis felt himself seized by the arm. He freed himself with his elbow. But whoever it was returned to the attack. So he gripped the insinuated hand and kept it a prisoner in his own. The man whom Lewis captured was a little red-headed man with scallop-shaped whiskers spread over his cheeks. A Neapolitan of the undone-trouser kind and Paris correspondent of several papers in Southern Italy, he was an exceedingly clever go-between who had lived in Paris for several years without either making a fortune or going to prison. His name was Pastafina. Lewis knew him of old. "Why! Its Pastafina."