In the middle twenties … also known as “the good ol' days” … when I was an art student in Paris, there were a great many places there that advertised Real Southern Cooking, Fried Chicken, and Gumbo, and a small retired group of school teachers who gave out with chittlings and spareribs and a pension de famille salad.
But those of us who could afford it, and we could now and then, preferred sole Joinville, duck Périgueux and a sherbet l'Ermitage. We also gobbled up madeleines (Oh, shade of Proust … can you see us, in those days, sipping tea and dipping our madeleines in it—not that we liked tea but because we were all reading Remembrance Of Things Past and some of us were to get past Swan's Way), baba au rhum, and we even warmed ourselves at the thin blue flames of crêpes Suzette at passing patisseries.
As Big Boy said, “It sure gives you plenty of Joe de vivre.”
Big Boy was forty, owned a top hat and evening clothes, was a nephew of a Big Name cigaretter, came from Richmond, Vah, and wanted to become a painter of horses. We were weaning him from corn pones and pot likker, and trying to get him to throw away his cigar holder.
Big Boy used to come from huge parties given by the American Embassy (“Damnyankees,” he called them; one word, of course) and sit around while Rifkinoff, the flower painter, and I sweated out the magazine drawings that fed us, paid the rent, and often left enough over to buy flowers for Ursule, daughter of our landlord, Hilaire de Salignacs.
We were not in love with Ursule (we called her You for short) but we were in bad standing with her papa, who did not like the society people from the Ritz who came to visit us. He did not mind the bums from the Left Bank, and the White Russians who stabbed each other with loaves of long bread at our parties. But the society people (who were just then appearing in a book called The Sun Also Rises by a young buck called Hemingway)—M. de Salignacs couldn't stand them; they let their little dogs loose in his garden. So we sent flowers to You when we could and she spoke to papa of our virtue and our talent.
“They are Americans. No temper, Papa … il faut laver son linge sale en famille”.
“It is not their linen,” said Papa, “it is their friends' little dogs in my garden. I will not have it!”
Anyway, one morning Big Boy came to our studio, only slightly hung over, and You was there posing for Rif, holding a huge basket of flowers. She was wearing the famous straw hat left to her in her grandmother's will. And the earrings that Degas, the famous painter, had given her grandaunt … but that is another story.
“Who,” asked Big Boy, taking off his top hat, “is the beautiful tomato?”
“Nobody,” said Rif, “she can't speak a word of English.”
“Me neither,” said Big Boy, “you-all know I'm from the Deep South.”
“Humor,” said Rif, “will get you no place. We are busy. Pick up yourself and scram.”
But Big Boy did not give up easily. He smiled at You, and sat down and unbuttoned his vest and showed the real black pearl studs in his boiled shirt front. You smiled at him; she liked class, and Big Boy was all class even if his brain matter would have made a moron out of a lobster.
“Could I take the tomato out for a walk?”
“No,” said Rif. “Get the hell out. I am mad to paint while the light lasts. Il ne faut jamais défier un fou!”
“Better get going,” I said. “Rif is in one of his Polish moods. Someone told him President Hoover's mother isn't Polish.”
Rifkinoff had one weakness; he believed that all great men were great because their mothers were Polish; the news that Hoover had no Polish mother shattered him for a whole hour. Later, of course, he said he had known it all the time … this M. Hoover was not great in any way except for the collars he wore.
“Let me cook lunch,” said Big Boy.
It was the one thing Big Boy could do well. His cooking was enough to make a Frenchman weep into his sauce. We never turned him down.
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