A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Page A

the clarity. There were some stories that seemed to be only journalism. But there were wonderful ones too.
    In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
    You could take your treasure with you when you travelled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new worm you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the daytime, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.
    I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoevsky.
    'To tell you the truth, Hem,' Ezra said, 'I've never read the Rooshians.'
    It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste — the one and only correct word to use - the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.
    'Keep to the French,' Ezra said. 'You've plenty to learn there.'
    'I know it,' I said. 'I've plenty to learn everywhere.' Later after leaving Ezra's studio and walking along the street to the sawmill, looking down the high-sided street to the opening at the end where the bare trees showed and behind them the far facade of the Bal Bullier across the width of the Boulevard St-Michel, I opened the gate and went in past the fresh-sawn lumber and left my racket in its press beside the stairs that led to the top floor of the pavilion. I called up the stairs but there was no one home.
    'Madame has gone out and the bonne and the baby too,' the wife of the sawmill owner told me. She was a difficult woman, over-plump, with brassy hair, and I thanked her.
    'There was a young man to see you,' she said, using the term jeune homme instead of monsieur. 'He said he would be at the Lilas.'
    'Thank you very much,' I said. 'If Madame comes in, please tell her I am at the Lilas.'
    'She went out with friends,' the wife said, and gathering her purple dressing-gown about her went on high heels into the doorway of her own domaine without closing the door.
    I walked down the street between the high, stained and streaked white houses and turned to the right at the open, sunny end and went into the sun-striped dusk of the Lilas.
    There was no one there I knew and I went outside onto the terrace and found Evan Shipman waiting. He was a fine