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 since the war has become the stamping ground of students who don't study and painters who talk. For really invigorating flings I commend the honest Parisian gutter, uncontaminated by theories about art. Indeed there are no theories worth bothering about, except those you shed in your progress, like an impeding garment. Ideas hinder thought.

"Within a stone's throw of the Place Clichy or the prosaic rue de Châteaudun there's not a single idea, but there's a lot of life—more than there is the length and breadth of the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Life on that overrated hill wears foolish disguises; the quartier exists for those who have more talent for dalliance than for creation."

Grover would have given a good deal to know what had disgruntled his cherished ex-tutor on the overrated hill. But there were limits to the confidences between tutors and tutees.

After a day of unreal but extremely fatiguing colloquys with porters and taxi-drivers, a day of miscalculations monetary and topographical, a day of zigzagging through streets that smelt stuffily of asphalt and petrol, a day of whirling around corners in little vehicles which were saved from destruction only by the famous esprit gaulois, Grover went to bed with a headache, too tired to take stock of his landlady, who seemed fat and fluent, or his room, which was both grander and shabbier than anything he had ever slept in,