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This perfectly true story began when Homer Vandermeyer came over from the United States to France. He came to do the place good, spend his millions and millions on enlightening and brightening its imperfect civilisation. Over there he had helped to get Prohibition passed; but over here the only time that he was not helping us was when he was finding out whether drink was so harmful to him personally as he had decided it was for his low-countrymen. He went on trying to find out, because next day he was never sure whether the feelings in his inside were that or something else. And those next days were the ones when he gave France more advice than cheques. But the cheques, when he had decided that alcohol was just the thing he needed, were splendid. They were for consumption and street accidents and babies and golf-links and a good time. The 'fors' and 'againsts' may be mixed, but the French authorities hardly knew how to believe it, and his French boy-friends even learned how to cash them. All the same, I did not think it quite patriotic of Armande, simply, so it seemed to me *the* best, because he liked a good time and wanted to see how foreigners amuse themselves in his home town, to domesticate him in a bar where he would not hear a word spoken that was not in good American, and invent a drink for him called a Prussian's hoof, and see that he took it regularly from midnight to dawn.

I thought he was going too far. A few nights later, I

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was sure he was mad, for I was asked out after dinner to keep
Homer company; and Armande, who is so French that he makes M.
Clemenceau seem like a fine old English gentlemen, paid for the
taxis. Wouldn't let Homer put his hand in his pocket. Just bor-
rowed a bit off me.

Mr. Vandermeyer, by this time, was a Prussian hoof fiend.
I had hoped for champagne and dancing, and found myself perched up
at the bar, while Armande, who had forgotten that I could under-
stand him, was tampering further with its original composition of
gin, calvados, cointreau and a dash of bitters. So I asked the
bar-man, a friend of mine, an Englishman and designed by Heaven
for a confidential valet, what it was all about.

'The young gentleman's got something he wants to sell'
he said; and a little later Armande, between sips at his Evian
water, told me that 'M. Homère' was just beginning to think of
buying his family castle in the Dordogne, and leave Armande free
to slip out through a hole in life's mesh.

The deal, even with my paying most of Armande's bill,
was not yet complete. That it was eventually pulled-off is also
entirely due to me. They went down to see the place, and the day
after I found Armande, his nerve and his patience very badly gone,
in the Vandermeyer suite at the Meurice. He was talking to Homer,
much too fast and quite often in French; his mouth working like a
fish with a complex.

Homer was saying: 'I like the place well enough, but I
don't see where you're going to put in a lift.' Your French châtô

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darned flat.' I saw what he wanted, something in that
which I would shoot up and down; and how little
in the shallow towers which just divided
the delicate XVII century roof. And Armande was ready
to shriek after a vanishing life's dream: a racing torpedo with
the speed of lightning and the voice of an ill-bred fury; and a
whole series of complicated French 'combinaisons', which included
buying the place back cheap when Homer had restored it, and it had
gotten sufficiently on his nerves. I was sorry for him, so sorry
that I could only laugh. I said:

'If the place doesn't go up, it goes along by the mile.
There's a day's walk in those passages. Put in a moving stair-
case. Up and down the double flight in the court-yard, and one
to slide upstairs along the main street.'

Armande nearly lost his temper, until we both saw Homer
looking very attentively at me.

'If my architect reports favorably on that, it's done',
he said. 'I'm meaning to receive there a lot. Nothing like it
to bring your guests steadily along. Makes reception the work of
a minute.'

I faded out. But looking out my window to see what the
was
explosion in the street below, I have seen pass a scarlet cigar,
a plume of blue smoke, a squeal. And Armande in charge of it.